So, yes, slavery played a huge role in leading to secession. But it’s NOT why the WAR was fought.

I think the fire eaters in South Carolina organized seccession because they feared for the future of slavery after a President was elected who had no support in any slave state.

I think Virginia left the Union when it became clear that Lincoln would force them to aid in a war against South Carolina.

The southern heros of the war between the states aren’t the South Carolina fire eaters. It is the Virginia generals– Lee and Jackson. Anyway, some southerners did leave the union over states’ rights. Others left becaue of slavery.

And 7 Southern states seceeded when Lincoln was elected because of his positions on land grant colleges and the transcontinental railroad route.

#68 | Jinchi
As for the idea that Southerners had “every legal and moral right to determine their own political future”; the fact is that the overwhelming majority of people in the South had no legal rights at all. Once you assert the right to hold millions in bondage, it’s absurd to complain that your own freedom is sacrosanct.

In that sense, there’s no point in discussing any rights or liberties going all the way back to the discovery of North America. After all, while not everyone was an actual slave owner, they certainly tolerated it, making them accessories to the crime. That kind of invalidates all the lofty declarations and high minded pronouncements about our split with Britain as well.

If immorality in government invalidates a country’s right to sovereignty, then there is no country on the planet that can claim legitimacy.

#60 j a higginbotham

From Wikipedia, Lincoln on 22 Aug 1862:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.

Thank you, sir. And on that note, I rest my case.

As I’m sure anyone reading the comments has figured out people from the South don’t think about the civil war the same way people from the rest of the country do.

As for the idea that Southerners had “every legal and moral right to determine their own political future”; the fact is that the overwhelming majority of people in the South had no legal rights at all. Once you assert the right to hold millions in bondage, it’s absurd to complain that your own freedom is sacrosanct.

So the states can join the union but can’t leave?
In the absence of any agreement at the time of joining, I don’t see how that follows.

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.

The constitution explicitly allows for the suspension of habeas corpus in wartime, or rather “when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” It wasn’t even settled at the time who could do so, although the Supreme Court later ruled, probably correctly, that it required an act of Congress rather than the president.

The constitution also grants Congress the power “To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;” which sounds a little like a draft.

In any case, nothing “justifies Lincoln claiming powers never granted him,” but that’s an entirely separate issue from whether the Civil War was justified. The war doesn’t become unjustified because the president did some bad acts after the war began; those specific acts would be unjustified.

(I don’t know what your question means, “where does it say the federal government has ‘rights’?” Nowhere. I never said it did.)
“

then where does it say the federal government has “rights”?

if “only individuals have rights” according to your interpretation, then how does that justify lincoln claiming powers never granted him? still can’t find the words “draft” or “suspension of habeus corpus in wartime” or “unlimited total war against civilians” in the constitution, much as i try.

In any case, getting back to the argument over what the civil war was “about”: yes, in elementary school one learns that Lincoln started the war to free the slaves, and that elementary school lesson is oversimplified.

But the agenda of neoconfederate/paleocon revisionists is not merely to point out that the situation is more complex. It’s to oversimplify the other way, to pretend that Lincoln didn’t care about slavery, that the war had nothing to do with slavery.

However, I still maintain that the Confederacy had the right to secede from the U.S., even if slavery was at the center of their conflict with the U.S. government.

and from another:

The southern states had every legal and moral right to determine their own political futures, even if they did allow the morally repugnant institution of slavery.

Again, for libertarians: States do not have rights. Only individuals do. There is no libertarian case for the Confederacy.

The argument is incoherent in every respect. There are two cases to be made that revolution is legitimate: (1) the government against which one is trying to revolt is oppressive, or (2) government is inherently illegitimate and so has no claim on anybody. The first doesn’t apply, because pretending that the first applies to the antebellum U.S. is absurd. The second makes the southern state governments just as illegitimate as the federal government; it would allow individual southerners to secede from the U.S., but not states.

The British were busy with Napoleon, and the US tried for a land grab. I’m sorry, but attempting the conquest of a huge swath of geography is a grossly disproportionate response to losing a few sailors. In my mind, that casus bellum for the war of 1812 is as flimsy as “remember the Maine.”

Saying that the hope of conquering Upper and Lower Canada was an important unstated reason for going to war is debatable. However, in that facilitating expansion to the west was an explicit American war aim, the war of 1812 was, in that respect at least, a war of aggression with the aim of genocide.

Here’s President James Madison on the eve of war. (paragraph 8) There, Madison cites purported British support for the “warfare just renewed by the savages” as a casus bellorum against the British. Madison is referring to Tecumseh’s War, an attempt by the Shawnee to overturn the treaty of Treaty of Fort Wayne by which the Americans had seized 12,000 km² of land.

Tecumseh, 1811. Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mochican, the Pocanet, and other powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before the summer sun … Sleep not longer, O Choctaws and Chickasaws … Will not the bones of our dead be plowed up, and their graves turned into plowed fields? In Madison’s eyes, this man was a savage whose resistance to American expansionism was unmotivated barbarism.

Britain was trying to support allied independant nations against American wars of aggression, and President Madison took this to be justification for attacking the British. Of course the British had self-interested reasons for allying with the Shawnee, but how does that make Britain the bad guy?

My favorite 1812 story — The surrender of Detroit. Abject surrender resulting from American cowardice and racism.

Heck’ve a job, Madison.