One neat trick to prove the Civil War was not about states’ rights

The dead week between Christmas and New Year’s was always a banner time for Retropolis. Perhaps readers felt they weren’t too busy to read something historical and that may or may not have any relevance to their lives. In successive years, we got on huge traffic on this NYE Betty White piece, the one about America’s most patriotic painting being German, and how the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s was also the best time for an enslaved person to self-emancipate.

The last week of 2023 though, I was too busy off-boarding from my job of 10 years to write a good dead week story, even with Nikki Haley delivering one to me with a bow on it, like a bad-historical-takes Santa Claus.

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If you missed it, the presidential candidate, when asked at a campaign event, failed to identify slavery as the cause of the Civil War, saying, “Yeah, I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn't do.”

So, here it is — with apologies to my former editor for getting this out way too late — one neat trick that proves the Civil War was not about states’ rights:

If the Civil War had been about upholding states’ rights, then slave states would have been fine with non-slave states passing laws protecting Black residents who had self-emancipated (“run away”) from slave states. Slave states weren’t fine with that. They pushed a federal law — the Fugitive Slave Act — that superseded states’ rights, forcing federal marshals to arrest and transport these people, regardless of the laws of the state they were in.

Bloop! That’s it!

In the lead-up the Civil War, this was a common point made by antislavery activists — a ubiquitous thing we have somehow forgotten, like sewing our own clothes or shape-note singing.

If you would like to know more about the “somehow” of our “forgotten” in regards to slavery, well, great news, you will love the book I left my beloved job to write.