#states rights

I am seeing more and more late night hosts, news commentators, and people I generally respect apparently holding the truth to be self-evident that anyone who thinks “states’ rights” were at all involved in the secession of the Confederate states, or thinks that anything except “slavery” was a fighting point in the Civil War, is abhorrently, callously ignorant.

Mind you: Not people trying to somehow say it “wasn’t about slavery”; just anyone saying it was "about slavery and states’ rights (anddrastically shifting economic trends andother complicated matters)”.

Somehow as if saying that Hitler’s agenda encompassed anything more than just the demolition of the Jewish people somehow makes you a Holocaust denier.

I was taught that states rights were a major issue in the war, with a key one of those states’ rights at issue being the issue of slavery. 

When I was in grade school, Lincoln was the Great Emancipator (and a distant cousin of mine! Cool!) who started a war to free all the slaves. That’s a very simplified introduction to the history that’s appropriate for conveying the basics to a grade-schooler.

In high school and college, I was old enough to learn what it meant to say, as a professor once did, that “History is the process of turning complicated truths into simple lies”.

People and their societies and their interactions are hugely complex. Saying “Hitler started a terrible war and tried to kill all the Jews” is not false, but it is a “lie” in its simplification of the situation. I’m not talking about mitigating forces or excuses, I’m acknowledging that different levels of detail are appropriate for different groups. A “true” sense of what happened is very different to a grade-schooler than it is to a scholar specializing in World War II. No one in the history of humanity could possibly know specialized-scholar-level detail about all of recorded history. Thus there are different levels of “true”–hopefully none of them actually false–in the knowledge of any historical event, levels that differ greatly in their balances of detail and summary.

Thus I was taught, as I grew older, in a liberal part of Los Angeles in the 1980s and 90s, in a very liberal family, that saying “the Civil War was all about slavery” was a glib, dismissive, low-level summary of a historically critical series of events that an adult should understand to be a more complex and detailed situation than the quick summary that was given to kids.

It was actually a hard sell: No one wants to have to realize that their heroes have flaws and mixed motives. But there was pretty damning evidence: Lincoln’s written statement that:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.*

Then there’s the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation specifically did not free all of the slaves. It only freed the slaves in states that had refused to rejoin the union by a specific deadline—Lincoln used it as a club to try to force the Southern states back into compliance. It didn’t work, and the result was the irony that any slaves in loyal Union states or territories–and there were many–remained legally enslaved, whereas slaves in Confederate states, as those  states surrendered, became legally free.

To all my knowledge, Lincoln was personally an abolitionist, and must have been happy to have been able to free people. But as a President, he explicitly prioritized re-unification of the country ahead of abolishing slavery. People in a conflict always have slightly differing motivations: On Lincoln’s part it was a fight for the continuation of the country, complicated by the looming and volatile issue of continued economic and social dependence on slavery in the South. On the Confederate side, it was officially a fight about the right of the states to leave the union in order to protect their own rights: front and center being the critical issue of Southern dependence on slavery.

So, when I say the causes of the Civil War include “states’ rights”, I’m not in any way denying that slavery was an absolutely key issue all around. It was primarily what the South wanted those rights to protect, and specifically the leverage Lincoln used to try to force them back. Many–maybe most–people on the ground saw it as “slavery is wrong” vs “we need to continue slavery, or our society as we know it will collapse” (which it ultimately did).

The war was not a simple dispute over the humanitarian, egalitarian rights of all Black people everywhere. It was complicated by the fact that the southern economy and culture as it was and had been simply could not survive without slavery. One side said that slavery was too high a price to pay for maintaining anyone’s society; the other side–the society actually in question–disagreed. Vehemently.  

Saying that the Civil War was solely about slavery–to say that The Great Emancipator started a war in order to restore and defend the rights of enslaved Black people everywhere–is simplistic to the point of inaccuracy.

The Civil War was a complicated conflict between leaders over power at the state and federal level, focused largely on the competing moral and economic impact of slavery in different areas of the country. The idea that slavery was wrong and should be abolished was not new. The Union did not free all of the slaves. The South had such a dependence on slavery that its abolishment would destroy their economy and society. No one’s motives were simple.

That the recent protest movement is about more than just George Floyd himself, does not make his death any less important or more forgivable. That the protests have shifted to focus on bigotry in policing in the United States does not mean that they’re not also about deeper, more tangled webs of racial and economic injustice running throughout our country’s history.

To see this momentous event as being rooted in complexities far beyond simply “Lincoln knew all slavery and prejudice is wrong and fought for freedom” vs “the South inexplicably hated Black people so much they would fight to the death to keep them from ever being free” is not an excuse, avoidance, or deflection of the issue of slavery. It is a stance that extends the simple answer into something more, not less.

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And The Study of History Marches On:

In the process of verifying Lincoln’s quote above, I found more. Wikipedia makes a point that many current historians (in works from 2006 and 2014, specifically) believe that the letter this quote is taken from was a very clever and effective strategy by Lincoln in order to sway the specific man he was writing to. That, in fact:

“It was one of Lincoln’s most skillful public relations efforts, even if it has cast longstanding doubt on his sincerity as a liberator.“ Historian Richard Striner argues that "for years” Lincoln’s letter has been misread as “Lincoln only wanted to save the Union.”*

And so we learn yet more nuance. They way you constantly do with history.

I, personally, love the thought that Lincoln was deliberately downplaying his concerns about slavery as a president, while “intend[ing] no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.”[2]

But that just leaves us with different issues. Lincoln still did not free Union slaves, apparently because of concern about his legal right to actually do that in states that remained loyal vs states who could be forced into concessions in order to rejoin the union. The key worry was that the entire proclamation would be overturned in later legal dispute about Lincoln over-reaching his authority toward Union states.

So my childhood hero gets bumped back up a step higher in my heart. But my point remains the same: These things are never simple, even with 150 years of study and hindsight.

I strongly suspect that the average fighter in this conflicts was not either a Southern soldier who consciously believed “all Black people must be slaves”, nor is it a police officer who consciously believes “we should beat Black people every chance we get”. But seeing the removal of slavery as a danger to your way of life meant that you thought the institution of slavery needed to remain intact. Likewise seeing minorities as generally an inherent threat to law and order that must be controlled at all times means you think the institution of racially biased military-style policing needs to remain.

The Civil War was very much about slavery. It was also intertwined with many complexities over strategic, economic, and legal issues–such as states’ rights–that weren’t that clear cut, even with states in open rebellion. So, again, can we stop reflexively forcing the simplification of history by vilifying people for adding a more complex viewpoint?

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All citations: June 12, 2020, 6pm UTC, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln_and_slavery#Emancipation_Proclamation