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Originally Posted by Lisnaholic
I can see that it's still a very contentious issue in a country that isn't mine and I don't want to disrespect the feelings of Americans
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It really isn't contentious anymore except for a select group of gun toting Southerners. I highly doubt anyone in this discussion has any emotional investment in the Yankee v. Rebel debate.
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^ Strictly speaking, the Civil War was about Federal vs State control; the whole issue of slavery was just an add on from Lincoln after they had already been fighting for years:-
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No, it was about slavery. The North wasn't so much pushing for abolition before the war as they were trying to prevent new states entering the Union from being slave states, as there was a power struggle between North and South and at the time 3/5 of the slaves in a state counted towards representation in the House of Representatives, and since the agrarian South had different political interests than the industrial North both sides were basically staring each other down over the issue.
I'm sure there was worry in the South over possible eventual abolition, but unless I'm misremembering my history it was really a political issue.
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Originally Posted by Frownland
I actually think it's a lot more similar to the dictator analogy than you realize tbh. Lee is essentially a leader of a foreign country that laid stake on US soil.
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I don't think it's really that clear. I'm certainly not an apologist who thinks the war was about the South fighting for its rights, but at the time as far as I know the issue of a state's right to secede from the Union either hadn't been properly addressed or at least settled. I think it would be a reasonable assumption in 1860 that a state was ultimately a sovereign power that was voluntarily ceding some measure of authority to the central government for the sake of keeping a functional country, but still had the right to declare independence and claim their soil as their own.