Confederate necromancy
I hear that some politicians south of the Mason-Dixon line have proclaimed April to be “Confederate History Month”. The most eloquent commentary I have read on this subject comes from Ta-Nehisi Coates:
The Lost Cause is necromancy—it summons the dead and enslaves them to the need of their vainglorious, self-styled descendants. Its greatest crime is how it denies, even in death, the humanity of the very people it claims to venerate. This isn’t about “honoring” the past—it’s about an inability to cope with the present.
As a bonus, for the benefit of those who are too sophisticated to believe that the Civil War was primarily a war over slavery, Coates provides choice excerpts from various states’ declarations of secession. Read, as they say, the rest.
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I, for one, welcome our new Nordic overlords Annals of interethnic harmony
As despicable as the racist nonsense in those declarations is, there’s a fallacy in Coates’ essay. The southerners objected to being told what to do by the north. Their racism, if anything, increased as a result of the pressure they felt. They held it up and used it as a rallying cry, just as the northerners did. But that doesn’t mean it was the actual cause of the war.
You’re positing a bank-shot theory of the origin of the Civil War, in which even though everyone was talking about slavery, they were actually motivated to fight and die by something else, so if slavery had already been eliminated throughout the US, the South would have found some other reason to rebel.
Slaves in the South made up over 30 percent of the 1860 population; in South Carolina and Mississippi, they made up a majority. Southern states had large bodies of law regulating the conditions of their bondage; for instance, in about half the states, a master was not allowed to teach his slaves how to read and write. State laws also restricted the right of masters to manumitt their slaves. Southerners may not have liked it when Northerners told them what to do, but they were happy to endorse, for example, Federal fugitive-slave laws. According to one study, a farm of slaves was over 50 percent more efficient than an identical farm using free workers. As assets, the slaves in the South were worth as much, combined, as all the farmland and farm buildings there. If the Federal government had chosen to end slavery by buying out the slave owners, it would have had to triple government outlays for the next 25 years to cover the bill.
(see EH.net, here and here)
And if all this had not been the case, we would have had a Civil War over… what? Tariffs?