> The fact is at the very least there is a debate about the origins of the war, whether about State's rights, slavery, or a combination of both and a need to preserve the union.

The civil war was about slavery. That the south succeeded due to slavery is fact, you could argue that the north could have left the south go but the south shot first. The only state which would have succeeded over tarrifs is South Carolina.

The confederate constitution banned their states from banning slavery. Also one of the main complaints that led to the succession was that the was that the north was not complying with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was extremely anti-states rights, it forced state officials to help slave catchers and removed
jury rights from the suspected slave leading to kidnapping of free born black citizens of the north by slavecatchers.

> Anyways, debating the origins of the civil war would derail the thread--and I think any reasonable person can agree that many people did not need to die, whether it be to preserve the union or defend the civil rights of African Americans (England freed their slaves with no war) -- another tragedy of American history that should be learned from to never happen again, not upheld as an example of excellence.

I'd like to point out that Britain had fewer slaves and much less money tied up in slavery and that Haiti also needed a bloody war to end slavery. Also that Lincoln and other northern anti-slavery politicians tried to end slavery peacefully and slowly but the south refused to go along.

---

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a pretty reasonable person.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/04/the-civi...

> I think that ground is generally accepted by almost everyone, and for good reasons. Six hundred thousand people died in the Civil War, a shocking figure which doesn't really capture the toll that this sort of violence took on the country at large. And yet when I think about the Civil War I don't feel sad at all. To be honest, I feel positively fucking giddy.

> And I don't think I'm abnormal because of this. Twenty-two thousand people died in the Revolutionary War, and we celebrate that with hot dogs and hamburgers every year. I'm sure that while Jews feel fairly horrible that the Holocaust happened, very few of them consider the fighting it took in order to liberate the death camps, "tragic." The Holocaust is tragic. Ending the Holocaust is not.

...

> It's really simple for me. One group of Americans attempted to raise a country on property in Negroes. Another group of Americans, many of them Negroes themselves, stopped them. As surely as we lack the ability to see tragedy in violently throwing off the yoke of the English, I lack the ability to see tragedy in violently throwing off the yoke of slaveholders.

> For most Americans, the Civil War is a sudden outbreak of a existential violence. But for 250 years, African-Americans lived in slavery--which is to say perpetual existential violence. I don't know what else to call a system that involves the constant threat of your children, your parents, your grandparents, being sold off, never for you to see them again. That is death.

> Malcolm X was fond of saying that that there was no such thing as a "bloodless revolution." I don't know if that's true, but it surely was true of black people. The Civil War is our revolution. It ended slavery, and birthed both modern America, and modern black America.

> That can never be tragic to me.