https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/06/confederate-lost-cause-myth/618711/
It was then, in the late 1800s, that the myth of the Lost Cause began to take hold. The myth was an attempt to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family and heritage rather than what it was: a traitorous effort to extend the bondage of millions of Black people. The myth asserts that the Civil War was fought by honorable men protecting their communities, and not about slavery at all.
The Confederacy was about state rights vs federal government rights. People don't understand that the name "United States" is quite literal. Every state is essentially a little country with its own government, constitution and State police force, and the 51 states have a federal government to handle big things like mutual defence and foreign relations. The Confederacy objected to the Federal government deciding that all States had to abolish slavery. For this, it was a stat level issue that the Federal government had no authority to interfere with and they chose to leave and form their own country based on this. Sadly, the issue was slavery. If it had something else, it might have gone differently.
ReplyDeleteAnd I have a bridge to sell you since you belief so strongly in the Lost Cause
ReplyDeleteThe underlying crux is similar to what you've written but far more fundamentally about how to understand what the Constitution was... with the upshot that something very much akin to slavery was bound to be the crucible of the underlying machloqes.
ReplyDeleteIt was not "just" how far the Federal power was to extend over its constituent States, but whether the limitations delimited by the Bill of Rights were meant to bind & curb States ...
(A) only each in dealing with any other member State(s) -- e.g., forced to recognize each other's incorporations & marital unions, forced mutually to contribute to nation's Federal military services, etc. --
...or...
(B) each in dealing with its own constituents -- e.g., citizens & other persons within its jurisdiction.
Once the North won out, the 14th Amendment guaranteed the latter in terms explicit and in no way uncertain.
In other words: By entering into the Constitutional covenant three generations back, when each State committed to -- say, by way of example -- the Second Amendment -- was that State in that political covenant "just" ceding a monopoly on arms with respect to other States, or with respect to its own populace (who might at any time change residences within the United States, and thereby to every national person) -- i.e., so convene confederately or unitedly? In yet other words, did the States mutually agree to embody the same shared sociopolitical principles (unite), or were they just contracting economico-militarily to conglomerate the collective costs of their national preservation (confederate)?
With such a very fundamental question left at issue -- and it is clearly not address by the original article or Bill of Rights -- it was only a matter of time for a matter so fundamental as, say, slavery would become a tripping point amidst this just-born polity.
The American nation as we understand it is really only just a century & a half old, so wide is the difference of 1866's Version 2.0 from the 1787 1.0 that preceded it.
Failed Cause, not Lost... since so significant a popular minority stands so strongly with it, it can't be entirely discounted. Indeed, has proven politically consequential intermittently ever since the difficult work of Reconstruction was procrastinated from public consciousness in the "Corrupt Bargain" of the 1876 election.
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