On the Civil War

If it was just a theoretical argument in a debating society or law school then I could see arguments that the South had a case. Clearly the Fugitive Slave Act was constitutional and it was not being enforced. Essentially a Resistance operating both outside of and within the government, especially but possibly not exclusively at the state level, was defying the law. Almost everyone believed that states had a right to secede from the Union. New England had an active secession movement at the time of the War of 1812. Against that are two, ok three, things.

1. The Union was new and loved and that was as true in most of the South, which was recently settled frontier as much as the North was. While once the war became seen as a defense against Northern invasion many or most whites in the South rallied, at least for a time, to the Confederacy, Unionist sentiment was strong not only in Western Virginia but in other regions such as Northern Alabama. North Carolina, whose state motto could be "We aren't South Carolina," only seceded after all surrounding states did and the Confederate army had moved in.

2. The legal fiction that Lincoln relied upon in invoking the Militia Act, that combinations to powerful to resist had seized power in state governments, had to modern eyes if not to those of the time some element of truth. The wealthy agricultural interests of the Slavocracy were dominating the state governments and acting against the interests of free white labor.

3. Dred Scott. The fact is that the South forced the crisis. In the worst way at the worst time and under the weakest pretext they dragged the country into the war. Given the consequences, proportionately in modern terms think of over 6,000,000 dead, they invalidated any theoretical argument that they could have made before resorting to the appeal to blood. Like the Palestinians after their campaign of terror their arguments about prior legal standing are rendered void.

The remarkable thing is that there was comparatively little resort to guerrilla warfare and despite some generations of bitterness and the abuses of Jim Crow the post-Reconstruction settlement worked and enabled the growth of a modern society that, despite the efforts of race baiters, is proving vibrant and tolerant.