It’s worth pointing out, the Confederate states actually opposed state’s rights. Part of the articles of secession were based on the federal government’s failure to enforce federal law in states that did not return escaped slaves. The southern states controlled the legislature, and states like Wisconsin and New Hampshire wanted to exercise their states’ rights to free black people from slavery. Lincoln didn’t even make emancipation a priority until two years into the war, and even then it was only in the states that tried to secede.
“State’s rights” became a conservative cause celebre during the civil rights movement when federal law was used to force southern states to integrate. There is nothing inherently conservative or progressive about states vs federal power, and it changes depending on who holds power where.
People who want to make the Civil War about state’s rights vs the federal government overreach are confusing two different eras of racism.
I want to start by saying you’re about 90% correct, and I’m glad that people have found your post to be very educational (bad experiences in the past with being misunderstood).
In both pre-civil war era and the civil rights era, the south wanted to have their cake and fuck it too. They were crying ‘states rights’ when we established the Missouri Compromise, but whined about the weak federal government with regards to the fugitive slave act. One of the primary drivers for the Emancipation Proclamation was actually escaped slaves after the outbreak of the civil war. The North didn’t know what to do with slaves that escaped, were liberated, or surrendered (slaves were sometimes conscripted instead of the slaveholder fighting). It was a situation that was starting to get unmanageable because of political pressure and the number of slaves, so essentially the Emancipation Proclamation was a last ditch effort to divert Southern forces into defending their slaves while solving a real problem in the North (it actually was fairly successful in this sense).
In the civil rights era, it was states rights when it came to integration, but a failure of federal to allow MLK’s nonviolent direct action to occur (yea, I know about COINTELPRO; perception vs reality etc etc).
The connection between the 2 and the modern day? They were all conservatives. The “Democrats” during the civil war were the same as the Republican party from the 1920s to now. The hypocritical rhetorical methods being used by conservatives to argue against the right to abortion has existed since Locke published Two Treatises of Government.
States rights to support pro-choice? I support it as an independent.
Fuck the radical right.
Out of context, it doesn’t even really make sense to be “pro states rights.” Whether or not the state has a right to do the thing is literally the entire question. Nobody is for the state’s right to do anything.
The argument is specifically that the state has a right to decide a given thing, and thus the thing itself is the entire question, not the existence of rights out of context.
Let’s play a game, look up the states articles of secession and see how many words you can make before you see a word starting with ‘slave’
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states
By my count, Texas maybe goes the longest before mentioning it, but they all do.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery–
Fucking yikes Mississippi.
It’s definitely a blow for the “the civil war wasn’t about slavery” crowd lol. Like I’m all for not judging the past by modern morals and acting like confederates weren’t as human as the rest of us… but pretending the civil war had nothing to do with slavery is simply a farce.
States rights to choose which federal laws they want. Like maybe they dont want EPA or the FBI or OSHA or black people or big government regulations.
