Some people will tell you, “Well ackshually it was for states’ rights,” but those states wanted to use those rights to enforce slavery.
It strikes me as like the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument. Like, wow, you’re totally right about the semantics, but at the cost of missing the point entirely.
Also the people kill people thing points to a need for widespread free mental health services which they definitely don’t support.
people kill people
I know! Le’ts ban murder then! That’ll fix it!
(oh wait…)
In my area, they say they support it but in the same breath will say they don’t believe in therapy or medications.
Source: my very Republican family
Honestly as a non american I always thought the point of that statement was that its not guns that kill people its the way you hand them out like candy with the barest excuse for any kind of safety evaluation that kills people.
No, it’s the idea that people who are murderous will kill no matter what… missing the point that it’s harder for them to do that successfully if they don’t have guns.
This is a very good argument for disarming the government.
The truth is that it’s not that easy to get a gun in the USA. It’s not difficult if you’re prepared and are eligible but there are some barriers that will keep a portion of people from getting a gun if they aren’t allowed to own one. The sad fact is, it’s way too easy to get a gun illegally.
When I lived in South Carolina, I had a friend who needed quick cash, he had
: 4 handguns, : a long barrel rifle, : a cross bow, : a shotgun
He asked me if I knew anyone who may want to buy any of it, so I texted a coworker I thought might be interested.
He showed up with around $1500 in cash handed it to my friend, packed it all up in his car and drove away, they didn’t even learn each others names.
The sale was completely legal, and took about 15 minutes.
In many states there are effectively NO barriers to stop people from getting a gun legally.
Dude. It’s pretty fucking easy to get a gun. You walk into a store, say “I’d like that one please”, they take your license and another form of id (literally could be a piece of mail), you fill out a form that says you aren’t a felon like Donald Trump, on drugs like Hunter b, a non-citizen, etc, run the most cursory of cursory background checks, and they hand you the gun.
It can take like 10 minutes.
Its harder and takes much longer to get your car registered than to buy a gun.
The barriers are super low. And if you lie on the form, it’s typically not something people can check/vet and is only used after the fact so people can say “but he shouldn’t have gotten one,! He lied on the form!!”
Its harder and takes much longer to get your car registered than to buy a gun.
Totally depends where you live. New York has some of the most comprehensive gun legislation in the world. It’s essentially impossible to get a permit for concealed carry.
However, it’s quite trivial to obtain a gun illegally, as one can see from the crime statistics. Even though your complaint about the lack of gun control is true in some states, it’s obvious that even the most stringent gun regulations would have little to no effect on the availability of illegal firearms, which are disproportionately responsible for gun violence.
It should be literally impossible to get a concealed carry license anywhere in the world.
while it does depend on where you live, this thread started with a window licker saying “in the USA”, which sets the bar pretty low. I mean between private sales and gun shows - it’s pretty easy somewhere in the USA.
I can go to any weekend gun show and buy as many guns as i want from anyone there with no questions asked. It’s harder to legally own one in several states, but getting a gun somewhere in the US is easy, and if you’re driving back, it’s not like the police have a gun radar to keep you from bringing them home.
Exactly. The Confederate States’ Constitution explicitly mentions and regulates slavery throughout the document.
It was 100% about slavery.
Anyone who says “states’ rights” without mentioning slavery is either an ignorant turd or a racist POS.
It is was not 100% about slavery. It’s worse than that because it was also about the fear of treating black people like political equals, and black men having sex with their pure white daughters.
States rights to do what? (⌐▀͡ ̯ʖ▀)︻̷┻̿═━一-
People kill people with what? (⌐▀͡ ̯ʖ▀)︻̷┻̿═━一-
… and free states were forced to arrest and ship off people who’d escaped slavery.
Conservatives don’t mean things when they say words.
I grew up in the country in the bible belt. I bought the states rights argument for a long time. I was never a Confederacy stan, but yknow sure I get it.
Then one day I actually read everyone’s secession declarations and basically all of them name slavery out the jump. Welp, fuck them. 🤷♂️
Article 1 of the Confederate Constitution says Slavery is a god given right and makes it illegal for any Confederate state to outlaw slavery.
So it actually reduced States Rights.
Congratulations, your kids will be ill prepared for a global world. It’s sad that foreign kids will have a better grasp of American history than Americans
Congratulations, your kids will be ill prepared for a global world. It’s sad that foreign kids
willhave a better grasp of American history than Americans.Now that is not really difficult. Most Americans learn little about American history for a start (and even less about some key issues where America had its low points), and nearly nothing about international history.
What American kids learn about WWII is the glory that the Americans have won over European fashism and Japanese imperialism, and how they helped people after the war. What they don’t learn about is how Germany got into the fashism (which has loads of shocking similarities to what is happening with Trump and the GOP at the moment!), or the atrocities that American soldiers and the government did back then.
As an American I learned about the trail of tears, the gilded age, the Haymarket Affair, and the utter failure of the Wilson administration and how it plunged Germany into desperation
What I didn’t learn about was how light our touch was in executing nazi and imperial Japanese leadership. And how instead we chose to back fascists over communists in basically all of Asia and South America immediately after seeing the utter destruction of fascism. Actually I did learn that Ho Chi Minh was democratically elected so I guess I learned some of that, despite attending a Catholic school.
I suspect they don’t learn about the 1001 coups uncle Sam either directed or backed around the world, either.
They don’t learn how the US helped Europe mostly to help the conversion of it’s own overgrown war industry back into a civilian behemoth? By exporting all of its own products instead of rebuilding the local infrastructures? Odd.
This is probably the same person who helped get textbooks updated to show pictures of slaves dancing and having a good time 🤮
Imagine feeling threatened by the notion that enslaving people was cruel and bad.
“It was about States’ Rights!”
“Yeah, a State’s Right to what, exactly?”
The top chunk missing from Texas shows pretty decisively how important that “right” was to them.
I guess I’m unfamiliar with this story.
The Compromise of 1850 said that no state above 36° latitude could be a slave state. At the time Texas extended all the way to modern day Wyoming. In order to remain a slave state they gave up all the land north of that. This is why Oklahoma has a narrow panhandle now.
Slavery was prohibited north of 36°30′ latitude by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. So Texas just gave the land north of that to Oklahoma to keep slavery legal.
Congressional majority
I’m an introvert, probably neurodivergent, and was bullied in school. I always thought public schools were not adapted for neurodivergent people and those that could not “fit in the mold”. I thought I didn’t receive enough attention. I always had more questions and were afraid to ask. So in a way could understand why some people would want to avoid that for their children, by homeschooling them.
However, people like in this Tweet are the exact reason why homeschooling in my region (Québec/Canada) is generally frowned upon. It’s always people against vaccination, the religious and ignorants that pushes for homeschooling, and that’s also why it’s very difficult to have the right to do that here. Mennonites are actually leaving the province because of that.
As an autistic teacher (as in I am autistic, not that I teach only autistic kids), I am on the lookout for ND kids who have slipped through the cracks. One of them this year took under my wing, and she just flourished.
When J would come into my on-level Algebra 2 class at the very beginning of this past school year, I could well recognize the fear of math lurking behind her glazed-over eyes and panicked microgestures. I suspected she was autistic due to her speech patterns, movements, and other things, so I put that idea on her counselor’s radar. Not sure what became of that, but it’s not my job to clock the counselors and diagnostician, so I just trusted they were doing their jobs. 😊
I started with building trust with J, by insisting that she just try and then, when she got stuck in frustration, showing her the patience she deserved and guiding her with a smile through filling the gaps in her knowledge. Once she could see that I wasn’t going to jump on her wrong answers and make her feel even more stupid than she already felt, she was willing to follow through on just trying as I’d asked her to do every day. “Perfection is a myth, and Rome wasn’t built in a day. So just…try! Give yourself permission to be wrong, because that is the only way learning can happen.”
And so she did…her grades for the six grading periods of the school year were (approximation) 70, 75, 81, 86, 92, and 98. By the fourth six weeks, she was asking for extra examples to try in class, and she insisted upon being able to understand how to do them before the period ended. I’m not sure if I could say she loved math after my class, certainly not as much as I love it, but she was no longer afraid of it, and she had developed the tenacity and self-efficacy she needed to show any future math class what for and no mistake.
J really did my teacher heart proud!
As an autistic woman who was beyond inept at maths, I wish I’d had you as my teacher.
I can always remember the day when I found out I’d scored around 12% and 8% on my simultaneous equations homework, and the teacher went through it on the board… I was so embarrassed that I went bright red, and even worse, my glasses steamed up
I would love to understand and be able to do maths
You still can learn! It’s horrible nobody took the time to teach you as a kid, and I’m not going to say it won’t feel awkward learning as an adult, but the information is out there and it’s valuable much like learning a foreign language to take the time bit by bit and be kind to yourself and learn.
You may never find yourself a mathematician or engineer (though I won’t say you can’t, you may very well have that capacity in you even starting as an adult), but you can learn to not be scared of algebra and even to develop a general understanding of calculus.
Paul’s Online Math Notes got me and possibly my sister through engineering school if you’re interested in a good resource for algebra and Calc at some point. But there are plenty of resources for arithmetic, trigonometry, statistics, and all that stuff out there. And most of all I can assure you math is worth taking the time as an adult. It can change the way you approach problems in a beneficial way and help you understand stuff like science better
Thank you, I’ve starred your comment so I can use the link later on. They do have adult education classes near me so I can also see if that’s appropriate.
Your mentioning about the science is partly why I’d like to understand maths, I love science and the natural world. I know when I’m watching BBC documentaries that the info is accurate, but I’d like to see how the maths proves and supports it… or just be able to see the patterns it makes
Ironically, my dad was an accountant and would go through my homework when I was in primary school. You’d think he would be helpful and supportive? Nope, he get angry and shout and tell me to “just think”…!
I literally didn’t have a clue where or how the correct answer was supposed to pop into my head. Not very helpful at all
That’s terrible. You really deserved better. I was very fortunate as a child that my father actually did math problems with me on my bedroom whiteboard before bedtime stories as a little kid.
And yeah the further you get into math the more science not only is explained by it but the more science makes it make sense. Calculus was a nightmare until I took physics and suddenly I could tie these abstract concepts and numbers to phenomena I’ve experienced my whole life, and with that more generalized understanding math gave I could extend it further and to less intuitive things.
A lot of people are really bad at teaching math. For some people it just clicks and they often struggle to understand why it isn’t easy for everyone. And a lot of people learn to dread it, when it’s definitely something many people have an uncomfortable history with, but it’s really not scary, it just takes thinking a bit differently. It also doesn’t help that a lot of people, especially from older generations, were taught math by memorization instead of by investigation. And a lot of teachers below the high school level (and even many math teachers there) don’t really get why they’re teaching what they’re teaching and have a general dread of it. Rules and properties seem simple and pointless when you learn them because they’re easy to demonstrate there, but as you go further suddenly it does start to matter things like how you can move numbers without changing the answer. But for someone who more likely wanted to be teaching children things like reading and writing and probably took algebra if that in college they didn’t really understand why things they need to teach need to be taught, and they may not understand why they need to teach things like number sense.
One other great tool is visual representations. Small candies like m&ms are the classic example, but basically moving things around in accordance to equations is an effective tool for building a sense of arithmetic and a baseline understanding of how real numbers work (real numbers just means numbers that you can actually have that many of a thing). And fractions while scary to many people are just a division problem you decided not to do
Hi, I took onboard your comment and checked out my local adult learning college. I’ve signed up to do a maths course, I’m going to see how it goes and try not to freak out or drop out!
I just think if I can make sense of day to day maths, I’ll consider it time well spent. I would absolutely love to understand science and its mathy language, the mini test I had to had graphs to interpret (which I couldn’t) so who knows…?
Anyway, thanks for the kind words, your encouragement and the friendly kick up the arse 👍 😍
That’s wonderful!!! Good job and good luck! And remember it’s ok not to get it immediately, math can be hard because it’s like a language but also a way of thinking. Also, I’ve never met a teacher who isn’t happy to spend office hours explaining things differently to someone who genuinely just wants to understand the course material.
I wish more people would pursue adult education the way you’re doing now, the pursuit of knowledge is one of the greatest virtues.
Mennonites are actually leaving the province because of that.
Good riddance.
But damn those boys can run.
runners, every one of em
How’re ya now?
Good’n you?
Not so bad
i wonder why the US is trailing in education
if those yankees could read, they’d be so angry right now.
Two answers to stuff like this:
- What did the Ordinance of Secession or Declaration of Causes (and related documents) actually say? Have them pull up the language of literally any one and search for “states rights” then “slave.” Hint: you’re gonna find one but not the other.
- Knowing more about the revisionism is very useful as is knowing when it’s a waste of your time.
Edit: sorry about the Battlefields link; it’s the easiest aggregate of several even if it also tries to support the states’ rights argument by talking about laws while excluding it was all about laws regarding slavery.
People halfway across the world know that the US civil war was about slavery.
yes, but those people haven’t been lied to their entire elementary & high school lives on the topic.
It’s systemic ignorance.
(You can see the same thing in the Philippines about their current president’s history. It’s sad how common it is.)
It wasn’t even about states rights, not really. If you read the SC declaration of succession, they talk extensively about the states rights to succeed legally and why in the first 13 paragraphs, then in the 14th they start the explanation of why they are succeeding. It’s about the northern states not returning fugitive slaves, as was the law at the time, and the government doing anything to enforce the Constitution. Then in paragraph 22 they discuss the election of Lincoln and his open opposition to slavery and they were worried about losing the right to have slaves.
Basically, if the government isn’t strong enough or willingly to enforce its own constitution, then they didn’t need to be a part of that government and they had the right to denounce that government the same way they had done with the British government during the revolution.
It’s 100% about slavery and there isn’t
It was absolutely about states’ rights.
… to keep the institution of slavery alive.
And to force OTHER states to return the runaway slaves!
Exactly!
And this is exactly why homeschooling exists. For the most part of course. It’s people who want a certain view of History taught and don’t want to have to worry about pesky things like facts or history or books. That’s why so much homeschooling is deeply Evangelical Christian, and somehow even the weirder branch of Evangelical Christians if that’s a thing, also why so much of it has Nazi shit involved. Yeah if you’ve never looked it up there’s a lot of Nazi propaganda in the homeschooling community. It’s just great…
That’s not really true with everyone. I know a fair number of home schooled people and there were taught better than the schools. When you’re in school, you can only learn as fast as the slowest learning. The “smarter” kids are held back. When we were in lockdown from the pandemic, kids could learn at their own rate from the online classes, and half my sons class was done with the semesters curriculum before the first quarter was done. The teacher had to find more for them to do which resulted in half the class jumping a grade when everyone went back to school.
I would let me kid do online schooling in a heartbeat if I could, he’d be miles ahead compared to going to school.
Yeah, strong “No true Scotsman” energy here.
The vast majority of homeschooling parents are absolute weirdos who have no business teaching anyone, especially children.
As a homeschooler who’s not that and has a group of other not thats, you’re right that many homeschoolers do it to restrict or provide incorrect education but you can’t generalize that to all.
Your sentence is proof you shouldn’t be teaching your kids how to write.
Lemmy threads aren’t formal writing, they’re textualized speech. Of course you’ll find non-standard phrasing. Note that the punctuation and spelling are correct.
What you call formal writing is what many people would call writing that is most easily understood.
Nice.
I don’t want to generalize, nor am I American, so this is probably irrelevant anyway, but as my wife is an experienced spec ed teacher and I myself have also worked in the educational system for most of my life I feel somewhat competent in giving some perspective.
Now, we do live in one of the Nordic countries, and I’ve lived in one of the others as well, and we were both raised bi-lingual (Swedish speaking Finns, to be exact). As my immune system is compromised due to a chronic sickness and I’m also an asthmatic, we decided to keep our son home for quite a while during Covid. My wife works with a relatively small group of pupils (~5) since she’s a private teacher for children with some form of Autism so we didn’t regard that as a really dangerous vector, as they were all masked up due to their own medical issues.
Anyhow, even with all our experience and know-how (and that’s besides the social part he missed) it was a major undertaking to homeschool our boy even for a 6 month period, and he’s a smart boy too. We made most of the material myself except for his school books, and damn if it wasn’t close to a full time job. Ironically we all did get COVID (and I survived, to my surprise) about 2 weeks after he went back to school.
His handwriting had improved a lot though, and he were several chapters in front of the rest of his class in math. He’s also almost a year before his peers in English, which means he speaks three languages almost fluently at 10 years old.
So, tl;dr: you’re not wrong, but it is possible. Exhausting, but possible.
Edit: typos.
What you’re describing isn’t “homeschooling”, it’s really “distance learning” or “online schooling”. It’s still proctored by professionals and taught by credentialed teachers, and uses widely accepted curricula and content that is also taught in a regular school.
“Homeschooling” in a lot of ways leaves the teaching and day-to-day up to the parent. They only have to give benchmark tests mandated by the state to show the child is progressing every year, but what they teach the rest of the time is up to them. Which is why a lot of conservative groups like it, so they can teach their kids their version of history and leave out the parts that are uncomfortable.
Your kid was learning the public school curriculum in a remote setting. This is vastly different than mom or dad giving them dubious materials from a religious company selling home schooling crap.
Yes that’s why I didn’t say everyone I said for the most part. Because for every one kid like the one you’re talking about there’s 50 that don’t get anywhere near that level of quality education. Even ignoring all of the racist sexist and let’s be honest evil indoctrination that goes on in homeschooling, there’s also a large amount of abuse and exploitation that goes on. Homeschooling is a shit show.
You would quickly run into a problem where your kid doing it. That problem being that a lot of that online schooling is from Prager U, and companies like that. They have cornered a lot of the marketplace on homeschool materials. So the only thing he’d be miles ahead on is thinking that black people liked being slaves.
That’s… not really homeschooling. The US is so weird. Are there not curriculums (curriculi?) to follow and standard exams to sit regardless of where your education took place? Most the homeschooled people I know lived in the arse end of nowhere growing up and didn’t have another choice.
curriculums (curriculi?)
Curricula.
That’s the word. I knew we had an option. Thanks.
iT waS aBoUt StATes rIGhtS ᵗᵒ ᵒʷⁿ ˢˡᵃᵛᵉˢ
Well, for other states to to respect South Carolina’s property rights (and the property was people).
But these same fuckers balked at northern states passing laws for harboring escaped slaves. So much for state sovereignty.
It was always slavery. They literally thought they’d built the pinnacle of civilization.
I wish those kids luck in life
They’re going to need it.
But, if they’re lucky they will potentially just be successful enough to reproduce and spread that information to the next generation…
Not guaranteed, but still… Natural selection does have an ultimate purpose after all.
I mean, it kind of wasn’t…
Lincoln honestly wouldn’t stop talking about how he wasn’t gonna touch slavery.
It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I beheve I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” Those who nominated and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had made this and many similar declarations, and had never recanted them. And, more than this, they placed in the platform for my acceptance, and as a law to themselves and to me, the clear and emphatic resolution which I now read:
Resolved, That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend, and we denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.
https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/march-4-1861-first-inaugural-address
What started it was the south thought the feds should be able to enforce southern law (escaped slaves are still slaves, and northern states had to return them) and the Feds said they couldn’t force one state to follow another state’s laws.
It’s a valid distinction, but almost certainly not what she told her kids.
Like when people say it was over “states rights” but ignore the Feds sided with state’s rights, and the South was the one arguing for a stronger federal government.
However during the war, Lincoln did outlaw slavery, but that was more of an economic sanction to dissuade European governments funding the South by buying up resources and land. The South would have still lost but it would have taken far longer if they were selling land/plantations/slaves to wealthy foreigners
It’s one of the few things pretty much everyone gets wrong when you ask what causes it.
Yes, the north did not go to war over slavery, but the south sure did.
Claiming Lincoln was coming for their slaves isn’t that different than modern ones saying Biden is coming for their guns
Slavery was the hot topic of the election, and despite Lincoln repeatedly saying he wouldn’t outlaw slavery, the South kept saying it and eventually started a civil war over.
Like, the modern parallel is almost too on the nose. They’re treating the border and migrants the same way
So it’s important for people to understand what happened since we’re facing the same shit.
Basically “states rights to be able to do what exactly?”
Like when people say it was over “states rights” but ignore the Feds sided with state’s rights, and the South was the one arguing for a stronger federal government.
States rights to force other states to follow their laws…
Their laws to do what exactly?
I mean, ultimately it’s about states rights, but mostly states rights to own other human beings and treat them as cattle.
No, because Lincoln wasn’t going to outlaw slavery before the civil war.
As I said in the very first comment:
What started it was the south thought the feds should be able to enforce southern law (escaped slaves are still slaves, and northern states had to return them) and the Feds said they couldn’t force one state to follow another state’s laws.
The South thought an escaped slave in a state where slavery was outlawed was still a slave. And that meant they were property and Northern states should have to capture them and send them back.
That was the line.
Saying it was just slavery is reductionist and doesn’t make it seem as bad as it was.
You’re giving them too much credit. And I don’t know why you want them to seem better than they were.
You should read the declarations of succession which clearly state that slavery was the reason.
https://lemmy.world/comment/11343369
Tldr:
The slave states lied to make themselves sound better.
Edit:
Listening to the slave states for why the civil war started is like asking a trumpet at his rally what 1/6 was.
They aren’t going to give you an answer based in reality, so why are we listening to them?
From the first paragraph of the Mississippi declaration of cause of secession:
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin. That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/secession-acts-thirteen-confederate-states
But sure, they were lying about it in their official documentation.
Specifically…
I literally already said this in the parent comment:
What started it was the south thought the feds should be able to enforce southern law (escaped slaves are still slaves, and northern states had to return them) and the Feds said they couldn’t force one state to follow another state’s laws.
So to recap, the American Civil War was about states’ rights to […] Force people who escaped slavery be returned to slavery. Is that right?
Yes, that was the final reasoning that led to the Civil War.
At no point was anyone of substance attempting to federally outlaw slavery until about 2 years into the civil war. At which point it was done to make the plantations less valuable to European investors who knew the North would win, but that the South was desperate for money/supplies and would sell on the cheap.
By outlawing slavery during the war, Lincoln depressed the Southern land prices, otherwise it would have went on even longer.
It’s complicated shit. Which is why I take the down votes to explain it. Reducing it to “slavery” isn’t doing justice to all the shit that was going on. It makes everyone seem better, and because that’s the simplified version that makes it into highschool books, everyone keeps believing it.
You have said multiple times that the civil war was specifically about slavery. Which is exactly what the woman in the OP was denying. Why are you trying to argue semantics where none are required?
Trying to obfuscate the issue beyond that doesn’t really help. If slavery were removed from the equation the entire issue would be moot.
So, their right to own slaves.
You didn’t do too well on the SAT/ACT reading sections, huh…
Sooo…
States rights to keep slavery, got it.
My counter to that, which states rights did the Southern states fight for?
Like when people say it was over “states rights” but ignore the Feds sided with state’s rights, and the South was the one arguing for a stronger federal government.
The Southern states though they had the “right” to force northern states to return escaped slaves.
Not over if slavery was legal, but over if a slave was still a slave in a state that outlawed slavery.
But I don’t even think you read the last comment if you had to ask that
So long story short… essentially the right they wanted to have was the right to enslave people. Dress it up all you want but a rose by any other name is still a rose.
No. The states and the Feds all agreed on their right to own slaves and nothing was going to interfere with that “right”.
It’s not dressing it up. It makes everyone look worse…
Then why did the confederates specifically say it was about slavery when they surrendered?
Is that really a big difference? The point is the south wanted their slaves and they rebelled against the north to keep them
Is that really a big difference?
Huge.
The south thought of a slave as a slave. And their children would also be slaves.
The North viewed them as enslaved humans, who were just humans once they were in a state without slavery.
That is a deep and fundamental difference. It changes so much about how both sides viewed slavery. The North was ok with some escaping, but they really weren’t going to lift a finger to stop it either.
While the South literally saw them as property.
If Lincoln had caved, it would have turned I to a total shit show. Not just northern cops, but “bounty hunters” who would likely grab any Black person they saw.
You really don’t see why details are important? I can just let it go if it doesn’t.
This is only a difference in perception not in reality.
The reality is that the southern states perception of slaves was and is wrong.
You seem to think that what the south said is more important with regard to the war than what they did.
Thats some Confederate sympathy If I ever saw it. Let me guess you’re from the South and white?
How could that possibly be construed as Confederate sympathy? I’m sorry, I know you mean to be on the right side of an argument, but in what way is saying “southern states did not see slaves as people” even remotely sympathetic to them?
There is importance in the level of detail being presented. This is what the phrase “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it” refers to. When we gloss over all nuance to the point that discourse becomes “this side good, that side bad,” then we no longer have a portrait of how that came to be. Without such understanding, we lose the ability to prevent, and our sole recourse becomes reaction.
Pointing out that the southern states legitimately thought of slaves as less than human, mere property that should be returned via the force of the federal government when northern states would not comply, does nothing at all to make them seem any less monstrous. Instead, it shines another light on the inherent fascism of their stance - “Do as we say, or we will make you.” When that failed, they threatened and ultimately attempted secession in a bid to form their own government.
The South did not want freedom. They wanted compliance. They wanted to dictate. They wanted control over someone else’s body to be instituted at the federal level. Do the parallels to modern right-wing neofascist rhetoric need more emphasis?
Likewise, being cognizant that the North was content to turn a bind eye until the Union was threatened in no way excuses the South’s stance on slavery. What it does, though, is emphasize how complacency and compromise with bad actors until it’s too late is often a far too easy path to take.
There’s much more that can be said, but I’m going astray of the topic at hand. At no point in the chain of comments was @givesomefucks@lemmy.world or anyone else presenting a favorable or defensive view of the failed Confederacy. To suggest otherwise is disingenuous and outright vile.
A lot of people just want to label one side “evil” and one side “good”.
That’s just not how life works, it’s not that clean cut.
And if you go the simple route and say they were just evil, you miss the “why”.
That “why” is very very important because we need to stop it from happening again.
And if you take a second and look around, shits real close to going bad again. We literally can’t afford to ignore the details.
Unfortunately lots of people aren’t smart enough to see all that, they want it to be like a football game where everyone picks one side and hates the other.
It’s tribal behavior baked into our dna, and it takes a significant amount of smarts to get around those instincts. Some people just can’t
…
I hate to be the one that breaks this to you, but American conservatives lie about their reasons the vast majority of the time.
So while the South did claim that they started the war because the Feds were going to come take their slaves, that’s just not true. As evident by Lincoln’s inauguration speech. Check it out, it’s mostly about slavery and how he wasn’t going to outlaw it.
The South saying he was going to, should be listened to as much as when their modern counterparts like trump also make crazy claims about what is happening.
Hell, they called Biden a communist and kept saying he was gonna take their guns.
Why would anyone take an American conservative’s words over facts?
The South lied about why they started the war, that shouldn’t be surprising.
I understand what you’re saying, but you’re missing context.
The Federalists were anti-slavery and its expansion. Regardless of what Lincoln said in his initial address, he wasn’t the only one who was anti-slavery.
How do we know all this? We can look at sources that provide historical context, like this for example,
https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/the-missouri-compromise
In 1819, Missouri wished to be admitted as a slave state because enslaved persons had already been brought to the region and were an important part of its local economy.
Northern politicians and, indeed, regular citizens had become concerned with what they considered southern dominance of the federal government, an influence that would only be enhanced with the addition of another slave state. The Three-Fifths Clause in Article I, Section Two of the Constitution provided for the counting of three-fifths of the slave population for purposes of determining representation in Congress. That rule gave southern states more congressional representatives than warranted by their white population and, hence, more electoral votes for president. As a result of the three-fifths rule, southern presidents became the norm after John Adams, and much of the federal government was staffed or run by southerners, from the judiciary to the chairs of key congressional committees.
This dominance had begun to grate on perceptive northern politicians, who used the phrase “Slave Power” to refer to southern political control of the federal government. Missouri as a slave state would simply cement that supremacy, and worse still, because it was located west of the Mississippi in the as-yet unsettled Louisiana Purchase region, its admission might mark the beginning of the creation of more slave states and thereby render perpetual the South’s control of the federal government.
That concern prompted New York’s newly sworn congressional representative James Tallmadge to introduce two amendments to the Missouri enabling resolutions. The first prohibited the further introduction of slaves into Missouri, and the second freed the children of existing slaves in Missouri when they reached the age of twenty-five years. Together these amendments would gradually end slavery in Missouri, and they passed the House by a northern majority in a sectional vote. Therefore, Missouri’s enabling act would not add to southern control of the federal government.
Eh. I’d argue that’s kind of a narrow interpretation of events. The violence in the territories in the lead up was 100% about slavery. That conflict just kept surging up through more official organizational structures. Lincoln dragged his heels in and was slow to emancipate, but John Brown was in kanasa chopping people up with a broadsword in 1856.
but John Brown was in kanasa chopping people up with a broadsword in 1856.
Yeah. But Kansas isn’t in the South…
That was over new states all being against slavery by default. The slave states wanted some of the new states to also have slaves.
And that comes back full circle to slave states fearing a federal ban on slaves, they wanted to balance slave/free states so they wouldn’t be outnumbered in the House/Senate.
Now, he was a badass tho, and was raiding the South prior to the civil war trying to start a slave revolt… But it didn’t end up well for him.
But I was talking about legal means, not a revolt. Which would have been morally right. But not legal under their laws at the time.
I’d still argue the example of the slave state Missouri organizing raids on kansas speaks more about the issue of slavery than states rights. It was the opening bid to the civil war and it was individuals acting on moral convictions/racial hate fueling it. John Brown is such a mood.
the slave state Missouri
I’d agree with you there, but
it was individuals acting on moral convictions/racial hate fueling it.
You just said it was individuals.
They should get the credit for outlawing slavery. Not the people who were 100% fine to let it continue like Lincoln.
People just don’t like it when there’s no “good guys”.
Sorry, this is what I get for trying to respond while hiding my phone at work. I guess I’m not making a delineation between the conflict and the ‘legal’ framework for the war. Yes Lincoln was a bit of a shit but he had abolitionists prodding him the entire time. (Ever read ‘The Zealot and the Emancipator’? You might like it—really calls out Lincoln’s positions and gives color to our boy Brown.)
do you think the North started the civil war
How could that possibly have been your take away?
because it isn’t relevant what Lincoln said if he didn’t start the war.
So you believe trump supporters when they talk about Jan 6th?
Weird…
i have no idea what your logic is
You believe far right extremists rather than reality.
It’s weird. But you do you.
The only person in this conversation is us, I’m asking you what the fuck you’re talking about
You’re taking the quoted text out of context. Lincoln said that because he was trying to preserve the union.
But he was still against the expansion of slavery, he was very anti-Slavery: http://www.abraham-lincoln-history.org/lincolns-view-on-slavery/
The southern states seceded because they wanted to expand slavery, and hence the civil war.
That sounds like what I was told in school up here in Ohio. People are in here with a chip on their shoulder downvoting you into oblivion because Lemmy is an echo chamber and doesn’t care to actually be correct so long as their tribe wins.
What’s crazy is people always act like I’m defending the South when it comes up.
Both sides were shittier than people think.
I’m glad to see other people who would rather be correct than please the room, purely for the sake of not crippling their position through dishonesty.
Lemmy is such a fucking echo chamber it makes Reddit look like a utopia of fair and balanced discourse. God forbid you stray even 0.1% off the path determined by the hivemind and you get pounded with downvotes like it is Gaza.
Yeah, I’ve noticed. They’re all team players here with no eyes on the ball, just the same as their opposition. I tend to agree with more of their desires and ethics than Republicans, but they all operate the same. Neither party will ever produce honest conclusions.
Do you know a better place? I really wanna bug out. I was invited to Mensa before, but I turned them down because it sounded like a circlejerk before I ever heard the word circlejerk. They’ve gotta be better than this though.
I had friends in Mensa, it is the usual academic wank fest of sycophants licking each others’ arses, as long as you toe the line.
I’m not even asking for amazing discourse, just some place which isn’t a complete and utter echo chamber like this shit hole. And I’m not talking of the communities known to contain nutters. Even Reddit was honestly far better but fuck spez and all that.
I’m not sure we’ll ever find our place.
Don’t give up hope brother, nothing is ever permanent.
edit: not sure who is going around down voting you, think you have an admirer
Just gender people who wanna have gender give them advantages without saying it means something.
That sounds like what I was told in school up here in Ohio.
Sorry… you’re saying that makes it true? That’s terrible reasoning. You probably were taught all kinds of things about drugs in Ohio which were complete lies.
You were also probably given a far rosier picture of American history than you should have been. Or were you taught, if you were taught about her at all, that Sally Hemmings loved Jefferson and wanted to be with him despite the fact that he never actually released her from slavery, suggesting he knew better. And despite the fact that even if the slave loves you, you still probably aren’t giving the slave the choice to say no when you want sex, what with them being a slave.
But I know I sure wasn’t taught that Jefferson raped his slave that he paraded around as his mistress in my grade school.
Calm your tits, sir. History has always been my least trusted subject. It’s written by the victors after all.
What are you on about with drugs? Who tf is Sally Hemmings and why should I care?
Seriously?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Hemings
You should care that one of our revered founding fathers kept a slave mistress that he raped when other people are trying to deify them.
Also, you should care about black history because it’s American history.
What the fuck can I do about long dead guy and his long dead mistress? Shit’s over with. Focus on today.
You can remember her. Like you can remember other people who were part of the black history of America.
Or are you saying black history isn’t important?
I’m saying history isn’t important. Don’t fuckin race bait me. I live in the now.
Guess you fucked up by not clarifying at the start that slavery still was the reason, but their is much more nuance. People ain’t gonna read that wall of text and still won’t to rid themselves of potential trumpets.
Further, she asks why it started. To that: the secession of the confederate states.
Bet she never read the Constitution, Confederate or otherwise:
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_csa.asp
“In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.”
The articles of secession of every single state mention slavery as the primary motivation, usually within the first paragraph.
