Ardainian Right on Nostr: Saying "The Civil War was fought over slavery" is disingenuous because it only ...

Saying "The Civil War was fought over slavery" is disingenuous because it only references the motivations of Southern states for seceding and completely ignores the North's reasons for not letting the South secede, which were very clearly not driven by a humanitarian desire to end slavery. The states that initially seceded decided to do so primarily to protect the economic interests of slaveholders, but war did not logically follow from that, especially because the nature of the Constitutional union was very much disputed at the time. And the firing on Fort Sumter was itself a declaration that Lincoln intended to enforce a view of the Union that was very different from what was originally intended.
This is where states' rights and all the rest comes in, and it's also where important historical figures like Robert E. Lee come in in terms of taking a side in the conflict. Calling the Confederates "traitors" betrays a fundamental historical illiteracy about how they viewed the Union and their loyalties. The States were viewed as more or less their own countries that had agreed to a compact in which they would delegate some of their powers to the Federal government, and retained the right to withdraw from said compact. And so naturally the Confederates saw their states as their primary loyalty, and not the Federal government. And obviously individual soldiers had their own reasons for fighting, very frequently no more complicated than "It's our home." And often they had entirely understandable reasons for supporting slavery that had nothing to do with personal profit and everything to do with concern over the fallout of said institution collapsing(see what happened to whites after the Haitian Revolution).
Fundamentally the slavery line is about guilt-tripping white people into accepting their annihilation, same as most everything else.