Thread by @17cShyteposter

Civil War discourse is very simple: if you can't honestly explain the South's perspective for deciding to do something as extreme as (mostly peaceful) secession, then you don't understand the Civil War, at all.

And yes, you may absolutely include slavery. That's a no-brainer.

We all know the North's perspective (although not really lol, but let's just pretend). But if you can't explain the South's perspective, then you don't actually understand the Civil War.

To understand the Civil War, you must be able to explain *both sides*

Wish I could remember the exact book that flipped my perspective on this. But it was just a normie book, not even "based," everyone loved it, even scholars. 700-page tome

It just laid out very plainly the political conditions on both sides that convinced the South to secede.

Let's pretend for a second that we're Martians. We're not Americans. We're not even human. No idea what any of that means. Our morality is divorced from them. We're just looking at a political power process, as outsiders, at what happened.

The North successfully boxed the South out of slave-state expansion in the new territories. All new states were essentially Northern, vote-wise

Again, I'm a Martian, I don't know if that's good or bad, I'm just analyzing political outcomes.

The result is that the South could never win another presidential election again.

The South, realizing that it had no more sovereignty in its former nation, decided to declare its own nation, where it could uphold democracy, as it understood it. For itself. By itself.

Once it did this—again, I'm a Martian, I have no human moral stance, I'm just looking at politics—the North chose to invade it, and forced it to become a conquered part of the nation it no longer identified with, and wanted no war with or part of

But which warred on it anyway.

This is what History actually looks like. Pretty gruesome, when you actually treat it fairly. It's not your beautiful morality tale. The conquerors of the 19th and 20th centuries have insane blood on their hands, while pretending their politics are pure.

Anti-historical.

Battle Cry of Freedom, btw. That was the book. Even when I was a leftist, I came away from it thinking it was very even-handed. An actual work of history, instead of propaganda.