Were Southern American Confederates traitors and paranoid fools or were they right?

[SineNomine]

I am all for revision, going against the grain, and defying groupthink, but to say the Civil War was not about slavery ignores, well, pretty much every expressed view by Confederate leaders of 1861-1865.

After the war, issues like tariffs and industrialization vs. agrarianism were elevated.

And yes, the Civil War was about States Rights...namely, southern states' rights to preserve about $4 billion (1860 dollars) of property (4 million slaves, averaging a thousand each). What people would not fight to preserve the right to own $4 billion of anything in 1860?

[Hialt]

I've been thinking, since this thread was first posted, about the term, "righteous," being used to describe the Confederacy. The Civil War was a cluster-F, with a lot of variables in the equation, even in its "origins," in terms of what those soldiers were fighting for.
Southern soldiers "have no monopoly" on the nobility of "standing to defend a homeland." But there is nobility in it, and bravery, etc., in standing up for one's self/family/homeland, and so they were "righteous" in that sense.
Of course, if they were truly righteous, they would have obeyed the Ten Commandments (Thou Shalt Not Kill), and loved their neighbors to the North, instead, so perhaps they were not totally blameless.
PEACE!

[Smaland]

^^

The Union Army invaded the CSA, which was a sovereign nation at the time. The Bible does not require anyone to be a pacifist, and so it was right to fight back.

Fort Sumter was a Union army post that the Union had declined to remove from sovereign Confederate territory. Only two Union soldiers were killed there, and they didn't die during the battle itself. They were standing too close to a cannon that blew up during the surrender ceremony.

The Civil War is more personal to me than it may be to others, because one of my ancestors was a victim of Sherman's soldiers. She was living in a house alone with her children; to the best of my knowledge, her husband was away serving in the Confederate Army. Sherman's men destroyed her house and her crops. Afterward, she and her children were left with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. They would have starved without the charity of neighbors.

In the Old Testament, Ezekiel Chapter 18 states that each person is responsible only for his own sins, and so I hold nothing against the Northern people of today.

[TheForeigner]

^^

The Union Army invaded the CSA, which was a sovereign nation at the time. The Bible does not require anyone to be a pacifist, and so it was right to fight back.

Fort Sumter was a Union army post that the Union had declined to remove from sovereign Confederate territory. Only two Union soldiers were killed there, and they didn't die during the battle itself. They were standing too close to a cannon that blew up during the surrender ceremony.

The Civil War is more personal to me than it may be to others, because one of my ancestors was a victim of Sherman's soldiers. She was living in a house alone with her children; to the best of my knowledge, her husband was away serving in the Confederate Army. Sherman's men destroyed her house and her crops. Afterward, she and her children were left with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. They would have starved without the charity of neighbors.

In the Old Testament, Ezekiel Chapter 18 states that each person is responsible only for his own sins, and so I hold nothing against the Northern people of today.

They were not a "sovereign nation", but an unrecognized separatist region of an actual sovereign country. They committed treason by seceding from the US and by waging war against their own country and people.

[Smaland]

They were not a "sovereign nation", but an unrecognized separatist region of an actual sovereign country. They committed treason by seceding from the US and by waging war against their own country and people.

The U.S. Constitution does not forbid secession; nowhere does it even mention this word.

According to the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution,

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Since States are not prohibited from seceding from the union, secession is a power reserved to each State. Therefore, the Confederacy was a legitimate, sovereign nation formed by States that had seceded from their previous union.

[longly]

They were not a "sovereign nation", but an unrecognized separatist region of an actual sovereign country. They committed treason by seceding from the US and by waging war against their own country and people.

He is correct secession is not illegal. The Constitution regulates all things in our country, not any law or even a supreme court ruling if it contradicts the Constitution. There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents secession. Our country is a federation, not an empire, something I think the left doesn’t quite understand. A federation is a collection of voluntary units of peoples, whereas an empire is a collection of people held by force of law. In our country, the people are sovereign, not the government. The people of the states made the union; they can unmake it. When we say states, we mean the people of the states. They entered the union voluntarily, and they can choose to leave.

Even today, the secession would not be illegal; that is why we should think long and hard before we allow Puerto Rico into the union. What do we do if they change their mind after some years in the union and want to be independent? It wouldn’t be illegal, but it would have to be a war for the union to survive. We’d have to go kill kids and burn their cities and occupy their territory, or the federation would unravel over time. Many people would die, but no one should be charged with a crime because it’s not illegal to lose a war.