60% of those younger than 30 say the main cause of the ACW was States Rights

[The Minsky Moment]

See I thought the crux of the issue was the protection of slave ownership under the Fifth amendment (deprived of property with due process of law blah blah) and the ability of slave owners to take their legal property into the territories.  Not even the Republicans were calling for abolition inside the Southern States.

In fact, the relevant state law issue re slavery was the ability of the *northern* states to enforce their personal liberty laws.  A question that was answered in the negative by Dred Scott.
I suppose one could cite that as a "state's rights" issue that led to outbreak of war but that is not the usual understanding.
It's interesting to read the S.Carolina declaration of succession - there is precious little in there about state's rights.  The main complaint is that the northern states were using their own state law to frustrate enforcement of the federal constitution's protection of slave property.
AFAIK the only real state rights question at issue was the right to secede, which begs the question.

[Tonitrus]

Languish truly is dead if a thread about the cause of the ACW gets just ten replies!

I am still trying to figure out how to do an ACW thread hijacking on an ACW thread.

[grumbler]

AFAIK the only real state rights question at issue was the right to secede, which begs the question.

I believe that this is the first time the phrase "begs the question" has been used properly on Languish.

[MadImmortalMan]

'The Wars of the Three Kingdoms' (which is retarded since if you talk about 'The Three Kingdoms' everybody assumes you mean China).

Yes, but Korea had one of those too. 

[Lettow77]

But it is total nonsense.  Both the Federal and Confederate governments did things during the war the pre-ACW federal government never would have dreamed of doing. 

The war helped galvanize a sense of Southern identity and national consciousness; defense of the that volk and opposition to the enemy became a cause worth sacrificing just about anything else upon the altar.

While the South may have been goaded by slavery, the North's reasons for participating in the war are worth examining as well; from the perspective of the Northern administration the greatest troubling aspect of the South leaving the union would undoubtedly be the fact they were responsible for providing the bulk of the federal budget.

The South had consistently felt like a marginalized, insulted and abused section, which wasn't necessarily true; The South was prideful, rash and violent, seeking equal footing with a far larger and more significant assemblage of people. That the North came to insult the South was no real surprise, for the South's behavior was in many ways contemptible, and also the extent of Southern demands were unreasonable. Maintaining the union on the footing the South wanted would've required a tremendous and unnatural concession on the part of the North.

Similarly, it would have been an enormous act of wisdom, kindness and justice for the secession to have resolved amicably and the North to have suffered the loss of Southern revenues, but the South was quixotically eager for a fight against slights which were at least partially imagined, and whimsically confident of the outcome. Any chance of democratic principles prevailing and a peaceful separation was rendered almost impossible by the South's euphoric eagerness to fight a war it couldn't win.

[Grey Fox]

This must be Lettow's most articulated post.

[Neil]

Being articulate has never been Lettow's problem.  He tends to wax romantic, but he's always well spoken to a fault, even when he's wrong.

[Razgovory]

Was the South actually bringing in the the majority of the federal budget?  That seems unlikely.

[Admiral Yi]

I can see that.  Keep in mind virtually the sole source of federal revenue at the time was tarrifs.

[derspiess]

Yeah, but they paid it in cotton.

[Valmy]

Was the South actually bringing in the the majority of the federal budget?  That seems unlikely.

This is a common Libertarian historical revisionist thing.  I have heard it many times, it has to do with how much coastline and how many ports the South controlled.  It is not something I have seen serious historians with access to actual documents from the time discuss and generally I discount motivations that lack any documentation of people actually saying they were motivated by that.  It is supposed to be an evil federal conspiracy type thing.

That is not to say tariffs were never mentioned but that had to do with the levels of tariffs being levied, which had been a bone of contention for a long time.  The Feds would have had to have gotten by with only the tariff receipts from Boston, New York, Baltimore and the northern ports.  Of course the Feds had other taxes, like on beer making, which was exploding in the north at the time so I think they could have gotten by.  It was not like the Federal Government was difficult to fund, it was pretty tiny.

The reason the north was so hot to trot was the whole Slavepower conspiracy, that these people were now destroying the country to protect their aristocratic and un-American lifestyles and the country had to be saved.  This is also the reason they expected the South to fold easily and the war to be short.  Even if there had been some super secret, never discussed publicly or privately, conspiracy to preserve the federal budget the political pressure from the Republican Party and its supporters to stop secession was immense.

[The Minsky Moment]

About 70% of the tariff revenue in this period was received in the Port of New York. 
There is still the question of how the incidence of those payments was distributed.
if you look at the bigger items, they are things like wool, wine, chinaware, sugar, coffee, silk and lace, linens, hides, metal and leather, glassware, hats, piece goods, and watches.
I don't see any reason to conclude that these items were consumed or used as inputs highly disproportionately in the South.  Maybe silk and lace but not generally.

[Admiral Yi]

Have you omitted export tariffs?

[Neil]

I can see that.  Keep in mind virtually the sole source of federal revenue at the time was tarrifs.

And the mills in the UK ran on Southern cotton.

[Malthus]

AFAIK the only real state rights question at issue was the right to secede, which begs the question.

I believe that this is the first time the phrase "begs the question" has been used properly on Languish.

That begs the question of why the term is not used correctly more often.

Ducks, runs away