Refuting Confederate Revisionism: Why can't the Civil War be called the "War of Northern Aggression" or a war about states' rights?

Battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. Credit: Wikipedia

Why can't the Civil War be called the "War of Northern Aggression" or a war about states' rights?

Because those descriptions of the Civil War are deceitful and odious revisionism of history, that’s why.

First of all, the Federal government tried to avoid bloodshed from the time of South Carolina’s secession (December 20, 1860) till Lincoln’s Inauguration (March 4, 1861) and on until the morning of April 12, 1861. Lincoln even addressed the issue of slavery in the South in his Inaugural Address, saying that the government was not going to abolish slavery in the states where it was already legal.

Second, who fired the first shots of the Civil War? It was not the United States Army (or Navy, for that matter) who did so; it was the Confederate Army that let loose the first cannon shot against Ft. Sumter in Charleston (SC) harbor.

So if the Civil War were to be renamed “the War of X Aggression,” the only apt style of doing so is by substituting “Southern” for X.

Third, the only “states’ rights” that the South was interested in was the right to spread slavery into unincorporated territories that would, inevitably, be either organized territories or seek admission to the Union as fully-fledged states. This was anathema to the majority of the population of the United States, which lived predominantly in the urbanized, industrial North and in the western states of California and Oregon, plus newly admitted Kansas. The last three, especially, were “free” states which had rejected slavery despite slaveholders’ best (and often violent) methods to promote “that peculiar institution.”

Southern “Confederate apologists” and their supporters in states that historically waged war against the rebellious Confederacy swear that “states’ rights” was a catchall concept that covered every aspect of life in the South, but that’s not true at all. Many influential and wealthy slave owners didn’t want to give up a way of life that offered them social status and financial security, even though there were alternatives (such as hiring poor white laborers, for instance) to the ugly and racist institution of slavery. They wanted not just to perpetuate slaveholding in states where it had existed since the 1600s; they also hatched plots to annex Cuba and parts of Mexico to expand it beyond the existing territories of the South antebellum.

Thus, no matter how much Confederate apologists want to change history, the fact is that States’ Rights = The Right to Maintain Slavery.

Just as in the post-Civil War era, States’ Rights = Southern States’ Rights to Keep Jim Crow Laws on the Books (and Blacks in their “Proper” Place in a White Supremacist Society).

As Alexander Stephens, the Confederate States of America’s Vice President said in the “Cornerstone Speech” of March 28, 1861:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails.

So no, sweet summer child. You can’t call the Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression or a fight for “States’ rights.”