I think the “serios historians” seem to be a kind of shady trick to disqualify historians that might cast things is a different light.
There is nothing shady about saying that a view is the consensus view, especially when posting a peer-reviewed article from a major journal that says that the view is, in fact, the consensus. It doesn’t make the view true, but it does raise the burden of proof of arguing against it.
Yes, for some of the states the immediate cause was Lincoln but for others they did not succeed until Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to subpress the rebellion
It’s true that some states were fence sitters, but:
The seven original Confederate states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) had all seceded by February 1, 1861, a month before Lincoln was sworn in (on March 4).
Of the four fence-sitting states (Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina):
Virginia’s Ordinance of Secession says “the Federal Government having perverted said powers, not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern slaveholding States”.
Arkansas’ governor famously said on March 2, 1861: “The South wants practical evidence of good faith from the North, not mere paper agreements and compromises. They believe slavery a sin, we do not, and there lies the trouble.”
The four fence-sitter states then provided troops to the slaveholder states, because they weren’t opposed to providing troops in the abstract, they were opposed to using military force against slaveholder states.
Here’s a link to one that suggests it wasn’t all about slavery, or even primarily about slavery.
This article is not a serious source.
For example, the fact that the author takes the time to quote Henry Rector saying “The people of this commonwealth are free men, not slaves, and will defend to the last extremity, their honor, lives, and property, against northern mendacity and usurpation” but does not think to include his “They believe slavery a sin, we do not, and there lies the trouble” quote is a massive red flag.
His argument that “The Union would protect slavery better than a Confederacy” because of fugitive slave laws is also wildly unserious, given that South Carolina’s Declaration of Secession (the one that started the whole Secession thing) explicitly complains about fugitive slave laws being “deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States”.
I think the quote from Woodrow Wilson might be worth considering.
I’m sorry, but this is a disqualifying statement. Someone who cites Woodrow Wilson as a reliable authority on slavery either doesn’t know much about Wilson or has some very strong blind spots.
Wilson was notoriously racist, including famously screening the KKK-glorifying “Birth of a Nation” at the White House and pushing out black Americans from high-level posts of the government.
But making the claim they are not serious because they don’t follow the consensus view is the rhetorical trick to dismiss a position rather then engage it. This seems doubly true if one takes the view that consensus is not definitionally truth. I don’t get why you are taking such exception to that.
Similarly, rejecting Wilson’s comment out of hand because he was racist seems like killing messengers rather than messages (and a bit of an ad hominem attack more than anything else). Lincoln and a lot of the North was racists. Lincoln specifically said he was not going to war over slavery, why make that claim if the Civil War was all about slavery?
Yes, slavery is hard to separate from the whole history but if slavery was really what the North-South conflict was “all about” then you should be able to directly tie the Tariffs of Abomination in the 1830s to the issue of slavery. Can you?
It’s fair to say that slavery was an issue that was related to and impossible/very difficult to separate from the other sources of North-South conflict but I don’t think one gets to “it was all about slavery”. If that is the case then I think one should be able to model a world where slavery didn’t exists but all the other sources of conflict and disagreement in the political structure equilibrium and the political economic equilibrium and the social/cultural equilibrium would not have still resulted in a Civil War occurring. I am not sure that case can be made.
If such a case cannot be made then “all about slavery” is a rather questionable claim.
There is nothing shady about saying that a view is the consensus view, especially when posting a peer-reviewed article from a major journal that says that the view is, in fact, the consensus. It doesn’t make the view true, but it does raise the burden of proof of arguing against it.
It’s true that some states were fence sitters, but:
The seven original Confederate states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) had all seceded by February 1, 1861, a month before Lincoln was sworn in (on March 4).
Of the four fence-sitting states (Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina):
Virginia’s Ordinance of Secession says “the Federal Government having perverted said powers, not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern slaveholding States”.
Arkansas’ governor famously said on March 2, 1861: “The South wants practical evidence of good faith from the North, not mere paper agreements and compromises. They believe slavery a sin, we do not, and there lies the trouble.”
The four fence-sitter states then provided troops to the slaveholder states, because they weren’t opposed to providing troops in the abstract, they were opposed to using military force against slaveholder states.
This article is not a serious source.
For example, the fact that the author takes the time to quote Henry Rector saying “The people of this commonwealth are free men, not slaves, and will defend to the last extremity, their honor, lives, and property, against northern mendacity and usurpation” but does not think to include his “They believe slavery a sin, we do not, and there lies the trouble” quote is a massive red flag.
His argument that “The Union would protect slavery better than a Confederacy” because of fugitive slave laws is also wildly unserious, given that South Carolina’s Declaration of Secession (the one that started the whole Secession thing) explicitly complains about fugitive slave laws being “deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States”.
I’m sorry, but this is a disqualifying statement. Someone who cites Woodrow Wilson as a reliable authority on slavery either doesn’t know much about Wilson or has some very strong blind spots.
Wilson was notoriously racist, including famously screening the KKK-glorifying “Birth of a Nation” at the White House and pushing out black Americans from high-level posts of the government.
Aside from that, his father served as a chaplain for the Confederate army and gave pro-slavery sermons. Now, Woodrow Wilson was not his father, and he saw the abolition of slavery as a moral good, but it’s not hard to imagine why he might have a pro-Confederacy bias despite that.
The historical consensus is right. It was all about slavery.
But making the claim they are not serious because they don’t follow the consensus view is the rhetorical trick to dismiss a position rather then engage it. This seems doubly true if one takes the view that consensus is not definitionally truth. I don’t get why you are taking such exception to that.
Similarly, rejecting Wilson’s comment out of hand because he was racist seems like killing messengers rather than messages (and a bit of an ad hominem attack more than anything else). Lincoln and a lot of the North was racists. Lincoln specifically said he was not going to war over slavery, why make that claim if the Civil War was all about slavery?
Yes, slavery is hard to separate from the whole history but if slavery was really what the North-South conflict was “all about” then you should be able to directly tie the Tariffs of Abomination in the 1830s to the issue of slavery. Can you?
It’s fair to say that slavery was an issue that was related to and impossible/very difficult to separate from the other sources of North-South conflict but I don’t think one gets to “it was all about slavery”. If that is the case then I think one should be able to model a world where slavery didn’t exists but all the other sources of conflict and disagreement in the political structure equilibrium and the political economic equilibrium and the social/cultural equilibrium would not have still resulted in a Civil War occurring. I am not sure that case can be made.
If such a case cannot be made then “all about slavery” is a rather questionable claim.