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Explanation: The US Civil War is sometimes said, by a particularly vile tradition known as the "Lost Cause", to have been started over "states' rights".
Other than being patently untrue in and of itself, as the seceding Confederacy actually denied states more rights than the Union did, the simple fact is that the war was about slavery. It's the only issue of the period where "states' rights" (as states had the right to allow or forbid slavery) even could conceivably come into play.
Okay I'll be really pedantic and say that the war was about states' rights, particularly a state's right to secede. Of course they decided to secede because of slavery so it's a moot point, but the North didn't give a shit about slavery; they just wanted to keep those damn traitors in the Union.
but the North didn’t give a shit about slavery; they just wanted to keep those damn traitors in the Union.
The North elected Lincoln, from the Republican Party - whose only real uniting platform was "Anti-slavery". They very much gave a shit about slavery.
From my limited understanding, Lincoln was somewhat committed to ending slavery but wasn't even that concerned with it, like it wasn't part of his first 100 days plan or anything. However, his election was interpreted by the south as a full on attack against their rights (to keep slaves) so they attempted to secede.
So the north gave a shit but understood the need to end slavery, they just planned to do it in like a 5-10 year plan. Meanwhile the slavers jumped the gun, shot themselves in both feet and made it the most pressing issue they could which led to the end of slavery and the damaged the economies of several states.
Yeah, the whole thing was a major unforced error on the part of the South. Really just shot themselves in the fucking face and caused half-a-million preventable deaths because they were too privileged to be able to conceptualize any sort of minor setback in their aristocratic jerkoff fantasies.
Good thing that isn't something we've had to fight at any point since. Ha ha. Ha. Ha...
Yeah Lincoln was WAY more pro-union than anti-slacery.
Fair enough.
Yeah it's one of those things where, like, the Union was initially fighting to stop secession, not stop slavery - but they very much cared about slavery. They wanted to bring the South back into a national government wherein slavery's time was numbered, at best, and were not willing to compromise on that.
And, y'know, fuckin' rightly so. Sixty years of compromise had led to no progress, so fuck putting it off for another sixty years of human beings being raped and tortured for the wealth of a few wealthy white bigots just to have a civil war crisis again anyway. Most Northerners - even most abolitionist Northerners - would've been deeply racist by modern standards, but awareness of the evils of slavery was too much even for them. Anti-slavery sentiment was genuine, strong, and widespread, even if stronger in a "We can't let it come into any other state" than in a "We have to stamp it out in the South" sense.
Most of the states cited the owning slaves as their cause for succeeding in their Articles/Causes of Succession.
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/secession-acts-thirteen-confederate-states
I want to say 3 of them didn't mention it directly. Three.
I was trying to make an it takes two to tango argument by saying that the North only went to war because of the South's secession, not because they wanted to end slavery (either motivation would be just and correct, don't get me wrong; I did say I was being pedantic). I mean turns out I was wrong because the North was committed to fighting, though not necessarily ending, slavery from the start so the war was about slavery as much as it was about secession.