It truly amazes me how human beings can twist history and make it fit their ideology and agenda.
SOUTH CAROLINA DECLARATION OF SUCESSION: December 24, 1860
[A]n increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. . . .
For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction. . . .
On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States. The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy. . . .
We, therefore, the People of South Carolina, by our delegates in Convention assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, have solemnly declared that the Union heretofore existing between this State and the other States of North America, is dissolved, and that the State of South Carolina has resumed her position among the nations of the world, as a separate and independent State; with full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do.
Anybody see anything in that text about states' rights other than a state's individual right to perpetuate the institution of slavery and demand that the north return their "property"?
South Carolina started the war declaring in writing, the federal government their enemy and then by firing on and occupying Fort Sumter which belonged to the US Federal government. There was no Civil War until South Carolina fired on Federal troops and property. It was only then that Lincoln asked for 75,000 volunteers. Lincoln was not in favor of ending slavery in the states where it already existed only in restricting slavery to any new states that entered the union. South Carolina and the Confederate States didn't want to give up their naggers. The South started a war they couldn't win physically, politically, economically or morally. Pity that most of the southern boys that lost their lives in that war had no slaves. Like most wars in history the poor paid with their lives to support the politically, socially and economically elite.
That's what happened and no amount of spin is ever going to change that history.
