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hippy-daze:

kripke-is-my-king:

hahry:

a venn diagram of the things george washington said not to do and the things america did would be a circle

#washington sitting in the afterlife screaming ‘TWO THINGS AMERICA. I SAID TWO FUCKING THINGS. #ISOLATIONISM. #NO POLITICAL PARTIES. #DID I FUCKING STUTTER #DID I STUTTER MY ENTIRE FAREWELL ADDRESS #GOD DAMN LINCOLN NEVER HAD TO PUT UP WITH THIS SHIT [via thecapn]

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(Source: taccone)

sexualbadass:

anachronistic-and-impulsive:

catatonicphilharmonic:

eryasterk:

jernsnerw:

“For this assessment, you will create ten tweets from the trenches in World War I.”

you’ve got to be kidding me

dying from mustard gas attack lol txt it ;* #swag#lol#yolo

WTF Franz Ferdinand. Way to get assassinated #politicians #amirite

Just got #trenchfoot again, that’s like the third time since the war started. #ugh #firstworldwarproblems

being held as a war prisoner :/ #wtf #canunot

damalur:

latkje:

falconrune:

alflyse:

maverikloki:

falconrune:

“the civil war wasn’t about slavery, it was about states’ rights!”

it was about states’ rights to let people own slaves, it has been 150 years why are we still having this conversation

Um. No. The Civil War was about States’ rights, but Lincoln made it about slavery two years into the war (see: Emancipation Proclamation), partly out of altruism we hope, but mostly as a political move because the Union was losing the war. In addition to weakening the South by freeing their slaves (not that he had the power to do so, and note that he didn’t free the slaves in the North), making the war about slavery ensured that France and Britain (who had already abolished slavery) wouldn’t side with the Confederacy.

^this is what I was taught in school, but I’m not sure if it’s true? 

I mean, I was taught that the South wanted the right for states to make the decision whether slavery was legal. They succeeded when Lincoln was elected because they figured he’d definitely pass the law to ban slavery nationally. The Union invaded to keep the Union together and secure their forts. 

I mean, it was a combination by what I learned? The North was fighting for preservation of the Union, the South was fighting for the right for states to decide whether slavery should be legal, as opposed to it being by federal law.

That being said, I was taught history in a conservative environment and our schools are ranked 49th in educational quality, so I don’t know how valid that is.

If the motive for Southern secession was the preservation of the institution of slavery, and that secession was what launched the Civil war, then to me it would stand to reason that slavery was the reason the war started.

Yeah, you have to realize that the “states rights” thing wasn’t this old Southern ideology handed down from the days of Jefferson. The Southern states had a huge economic dependence on slave labor and their rhetoric towards slavery shifted drastically as the importance of cotton increased. As well, even though Lincoln didn’t come into office with the express intent of freeing all the slaves, and it is perhaps misleading to lionize him as a great liberator, the Republican party was founded on anti-slavery principles, and this was probably their biggest party plank in 1860 and the driving issue in the election.

The Republican platform was not about freeing slaves but preventing the spread of slavery into new states, which would eventually amount to the same thing somewhere vaguely down the line. As more and more free states were admitted to the union, the balance of power between the North and the South would shift, blah blah blah, the slave states were afraid of that happening because they had developed an economy and a culture that depended on the ruthless exploitation and ownership of other human beings.

One thing you have to realize about the historiography concerning the Civil War is that a lot of it is v. conciliatory towards the South. The Reconstruction was a failure and the KKK and assorted violent mobs crushed a lot of the attempts to get things like the Fifteenth Amendment to stick, and at that point Northern whites kind of stopped trying for a while, and so race relations declined even after slavery was abolished. But the attempt to distance the root cause of the Civil War from slavery is generally an attempt to distance American history from slavery, to make it nobler and more sympathetic. It’s an anachronistic gesture, though, because the contemporary sources were p. upfront about fighting against or to preserve slavery, and without slavery the Civil War wouldn’t have happened.

I’m pretty sure South Carolina’s “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union” specifically mentioned slavery, and that was written in 1860.

Slavery was absolutely a part of it and it’s impossible to deny that, but there were also other differences between the Northern and Southern states that led to the Civil War.

For instance, their types of economies. The North had some subsistence farming, but was mostly about factories and industry by that point in history. The South was almost entirely large plantations and farming cash crops like cotton. Because of this, there were major problems within the U.S. about things like international trade. The government had to tax imports to encourage domestic growth, but they also couldn’t put tariffs on everything because they couldn’t entirely cut off trade with other countries. So what it roughly boiled down to was they could either put tariffs on raw materials, which the South produced, or on finished products, which the North produced, and the trend was heading towards putting tariffs on finished goods. With a tariff on foreign finished goods, people were more likely to buy domestically-made things… but they didn’t care whether they bought the raw goods from the South or from other countries, so it was hurting the South.

…That’s a gross oversimplification of that particular issue that I’ve typed at 3 AM, but it’s still the general idea.

On top of that, there were major cultural differences between the North and the South that led to tensions and failures to communicate. The South tried to institute a kind of aristocracy like you would’ve found in most parts of Europe at the time - you would have gentlemen and women in their grand estates, and then there would be everyone else who worked the land and whatnot. This really worked in the South though, because most farmowners in the South didn’t have the big plantations and grand estates… but they believed that they could work and get them, and then be gentlemen/women themselves. The American Dream right at work! Meanwhile in the North, everyone worked all of the time. The people (mostly men) who were farmers in the North did that, the unmarried women went and worked in factories making cloth or clothing, and no one had grand estates or an image of aristocracy. There were aristocrats, don’t get me wrong, and they later became the robber-barons of the 1880’s, but it wasn’t in the same style as the aristocrats of the South.

Overall, the South just tended to see itself as generally a separate country from the North, just operating under the same government. And they saw that government as one that was becoming more and more oppressive to their culture, economy, and way of life. And if, less than 100 years before, the colonies could decide to rebel against an oppressive government and form their own country, why couldn’t they then do it for themselves, for nearly the same reasons?

Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like slavery didn’t factor into it as well. It was absolutely a part of the reason the Civil War happened. But it was just one in a fairly long list of reasons to secede from the Union - in fact, I would argue that it was more of a catalyst than a cause. The South saw the Civil War as their own war for independence  The only difference is, this time they lost.

…I hope all of that made sense. As both a history minor - not a major - and someone who went to a NYC public high school that specialized in American history, I tend to just kind of vomit information on to a page and hope that it comes together somehow. But I couldn’t resist putting my two cents in.

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