[dmichulke]

There are historical views stating that the American Civil War was in fact a secessionist war against an increasingly powerful federal government and that slavery was just used as one cause, obviously the most "despicable" from today's view, in an effort to legitimize an otherwise illegitimate war against secessionist states.

You can see this partly in quotes from Lincoln, in constitutional law of the states (some explicitly reserved the right to leave the union) and the fact that equality before the law was not achieved until hundred years later (assuming the view point that it was achieved at all).

This view results in two things:

1. The confederate flag is not a racist symbol per se (it is used as one though as is the Swastika)

2. The war was just another war about power and money, such as pretty much every other war. Just ask yourself what was the last humanitarian war you witnessed?

Sources:

- Google for "Abraham Lincoln Racist". It is a very much divided topic.

- 2nd paragraph here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_American_Civil_...

- There was a fantastic seminar on this topic (with downloadable Audio files) by Walter Block (a Libertarian) but I cant seem to find it.

[lucozade]

I'm not sure I follow. It may well be that the north had ulterior motives beyond humanitarianism but that doesn't take away from the fact that the explicit reason that a number of states gave for seceding was to preserve slavery.

I'm not sure I get your point about the flag either. Of course, it's not racist per se, it's abstract. But it's almost exclusively flown as a symbol of pride in the confederate institutions that it represents. Those institutions were explicitly racist. As you say, it has direct parallels with the swastika.

> what was the last humanitarian war you witnessed?

And finally, this really doesn't take into account the period. It was not at all unusual, in the mid 19C, for countries to use military action for social aims. Now, I happen to think that an awful lot of it was on behalf of evangelism of "superior" values rather than humanitarianism. This was rife in British establishment thinking at the time and was prevalent in the northern states too.

In other words, I think it's justified to believe that these actions were driven by feelings of moral superiority rather than human equality. But to suggest that they can all be understood as power plays simply doesn't fit the facts.

[DubiousPusher]

Absolutely. The cause of the war was succession. There was no legally defined process for succession and the withdrawal of United States soldiers from the territory of succeeded parties. If there had been, would the North have fought a noble war sacrificing life and treasure to free black people? Absolutely not. For god sake, they barely passed the 13th amendment. Abraham Lincoln himself said that if he could restore the Union without freeing a single black he would.

What is fiction however is that any other issue besides slavery led the South to succeed. Here are the "Declaration of Causes of Succession" made by four of the states.

http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~ras2777/amgov/secession.html

These documents were intended as equivalents to the Declaration of Independence made by the U.S. in which Thomas Jefferson outlined a list of grievances the colonists had with the king. The grievances you'll find in these documents almost exclusively revolve around slavery. The one from Texas contains this little gem.

"We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable."

Yes, the war was about white people and their problems with each other but that does not mean the Confederacy was not a horrifyingly evil society. They desired to raise a nation founded on the principal of racist slavery. And people rightly object to being subjected to the symbols of that nation.

[vec]

Free southerners (to massively oversimplify, and with recognition that this excludes the very different concerns of enslaved southerners) were worried about the federal government getting both strong enough and regionally diverse enough to abolish slavery, which they felt would be both culturally and economically disastrous.

Northerners (to also massively oversimplify) didn't really care one way or the other about the moral question of slavery, at least not until fairly late in the war. They were worried about the Union dissolving into a dozen perpetually feuding nation states (like they saw in 19th century Europe) and taking American prosperity and power with it.

Both sides were probably correct. Had the war not occurred, abolition via the political process was eventually inevitable. Demographics weren't on the Confederate side. And had the Confederacy succeeded there's almost certainly no Pax Americana in the 20th century.

The American Civil War was fundamentally about slavery. It was also fundamentally about states rights vs federal power. Specifically, it was about the inherent instability of a specific, geographically coherent region having a slave economy inside a larger nation where slavery was generally illegal and where they would no longer unilaterally held any political veto points. But more fundamentally, why should it be surprising that the people who disagreed strongly enough to shoot at one another didn't cleanly line up about the exact single issue they were fighting about? History's not under any obligation to be simple and coherent.

And since this thread is already Godwined, If you went back and polled the average German circa 1940 on whether their flag was racist, I suspect the vast majority would emphatically insist it was about national pride and cultural unity and whatnot. Most arguments about why the Confederate flag is fine also accidentally serve as compelling arguments as to why Swatstikas are fine, and I've yet to hear a compelling distinction between the two cases.