politics

To expand on ripcord's answer, which is entirely accurate, there's nothing inherently conservative or progressive about states' rights. Politicians support or oppose states' rights based on whether they support the policies of the state or the federal government.

Slavery was federal law. Secessionists opposed a state's right to declare escaped slaves as free.

New territories were split on the issue of slavery, but it was Lincoln's promise to make abolition the law for all new territories that upset secessionists. The Nebraska territories were anti-slavery, while the New Mexico territories were mixed. In either case, neither wanted to leave it to new states to determine the law for themselves.

Then you have the question of secession itself. South Carolina, and the subsequent Confederate states, claimed that a state's right to secede was implied in thr Constitution. Lincoln, the Republicans, and really everyone in the Union disagreed. It's a weird, tautological argument to say that seceding states were seceding because they were in favor of a state's right to secede from the Union. But on this issue, there were clear opinions on either side, with the Union opposing the legal "right" to secede and the Confederacy supporting it. One might argue that the Civil War was technically fought over a state's right to seced, but that's a big circular freeway with no exits.

There were many more factors that led up to secession and the Civil War, but the common thread of slavery ran through the entire conflict. On that one issue, slavery, it is not correct to say that the Confederate States seceded to defend the state's right of self-determination, because they were specifically and vehemently opposed to a state's right to self-determine whether slavery was legal. The abolitionists were not in a position before the war to free the slaves in the South, and the federal government was not trying to exert its power over the states that attempted to secede. The federal government was refusing to enforce slavery legislation in all states, and it intended to make slavery illegal in all new territories, but in both of those questions, the Confederacy was not taking the side of state's rights.

TlDr, Confederates were even bigger shitheels than you probably think.

Yes, but no. But mostly yes.

I don't mind the downvotes. I'm too long winded, and I'll be the first to admit that if I think somebody is writing a diatribe about how misunderstood the Confederacy was, I would just downvote the bigot and move on, too. And while it's a pet peeve of mine, really there's no functional difference when it comes to understanding the Civil War.

Really, it's alarming that we must say fuck the Confederates, fuck the slave owners, fuck the bigots and racists and Nazis and fascists. We allowed ourselves to think those ideologies were defeated, and we let our guard down.

But that's also why I think it's important to get the details right. The Civil War wasn't a war of Northern Aggression, or a federal government overreach, or the mighty Union beating down our poor country bretheren into submission. The Confederacy were the fascists who wanted to exert their will on the citizens. They represented a political majority representing an extremist minority, and when they were rebuffed by the democratic process, they tried to use violence and phony legal arguments.

There are a shit ton of parallels between our current government and the pre-Civil War era. A hostile legislatire overrun with extreme bigoted fascists pushing imaginary legal arguments and horrifying morality has just a soupcon of Confederacy.

Yeah, I try to bring this up anytime state's rights are brought up by Confederate supporters, because I think we concede too quickly on that point. But I understand the confusion, because online, there's a lot of "well, aktshually slaves learned trades" bullshit, especially right now. I could probably help myself by whittling down the argument to a shorter, clearer purpose statement. Something like "Confederates were even bigger shitheels than you think!" It's a nuanced issue that doesn't make a practical difference for most people, though.