"For anybody with half a brain, the Civil War was about states' rights"-johnflubs
Sure, johnny, the states' rights to own slaves.
You're living in denial of the claims of the very people who seceded.
They said in so many words that the war was about slavery:
http://www.portside.org/2013-11-04/abso ... ut-slavery
All you need to do is read the Declaration of Causes from four of them:
http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~ras2777/a ... ssion.html
"It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction."-Mississippi's first reason to secede
"It refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion."-Mississippi's second reason secede
"It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain."-Mississippi's fourth reason to secede
"It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst."-Mississippi's fifth reason to secede
Then there's this:
"The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.
This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell.""-Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens
They said it themselves, johnny, not me.
If you don't trust them to know what their reasons were, who are you pretending knows better?
- By johnforbes