States' Rights

Ah, red meat for southerners like me. And I consider myself libertarian on top of that, so the states' rights argument has always appealed to me on a couple of levels. I get it. I get why people down here still resent the portrayal and stereotyping of southerners. I even understand how some here can keep putting "rebel" flags up on their land or cars and tell themselves and others that it's not racist.

I've never felt the argument for states' rights against the federal government's meddling, and for secession and, therefore the Civil War, though, is a justifiable enough argument because, frankly, slavery was just too abhorrent. But I couldn't put the right words to that feeling. And there was still always something there, something in the back of my mind that hung onto this reasoning about why the Confederacy was OK and the Union wasn't, when it came to secession (though not slavery itself).

But this article tears that apart. This is such an interesting argument against the continued use of "yes, slavery was bad, but the civil war wasn't about slavery, it was about states' rights". This author also happens to make his case without being terribly insulting to southerners (not a small bonus, honestly). Though I have to admit that I'm easily swayed here because I don't like justifying the Confederacy's secession, which always feels like a defense of slavery, too, so I'm not really running this one through the intellectual ringer. The comments are also interesting, for a change, with those who both agree and disagree with the writer.

(But I still don't like calling it a "Civil War" because technically the Confederates had no interest in taking over the current federal government. They wanted their own. And they didn't want someone in Washington telling them what they could and couldn't do, or taxing the hell out of them to support things with which they didn't agree. Hmmm...)