One neat trick to prove the Civil War was not about states’ rights

The dead week between Christmas and New Year’s was always a banner time for Retropolis. Perhaps readers felt they weren’t too busy to read something historical and that may or may not have any relevance to their lives. In successive years, we got on huge traffic on this NYE Betty White piece, the one about America’s most patriotic painting being German, and how the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s was also the best time for an enslaved person to self-emancipate.

The last week of 2023 though, I was too busy off-boarding from my job of 10 years to write a good dead week story, even with Nikki Haley delivering one to me with a bow on it, like a bad-historical-takes Santa Claus.

Thanks for reading Hard-G History! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

If you missed it, the presidential candidate, when asked at a campaign event, failed to identify slavery as the cause of the Civil War, saying, “Yeah, I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn't do.”

So, here it is — with apologies to my former editor for getting this out way too late — one neat trick that proves the Civil War was not about states’ rights:

If the Civil War had been about upholding states’ rights, then slave states would have been fine with non-slave states passing laws protecting Black residents who had self-emancipated (“run away”) from slave states. Slave states weren’t fine with that. They pushed a federal law — the Fugitive Slave Act — that superseded states’ rights, forcing federal marshals to arrest and transport these people, regardless of the laws of the state they were in.

Bloop! That’s it!

In the lead-up the Civil War, this was a common point made by antislavery activists — a ubiquitous thing we have somehow forgotten, like sewing our own clothes or shape-note singing.

If you would like to know more about the “somehow” of our “forgotten” in regards to slavery, well, great news, you will love the book I left my beloved job to write.

From my old Flickr

South Texas, 2006

She was a sex worker, and when our Greyhound bus made a stop, she would try to get some work before we had to board again. Her hand and the light and her gaze upward, I thought she looked like the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation.

An Aural Recommendation

This Coke Studio Pakistan recording of the sufi folksinger Sanam Marvi. Listen to her voice! And she’s sitting down!

If you don’t like dramatic intros, you can cut to the 2:00 mark for the groove, and if you turn on the captions, there’s an Urdu and English translation.

An Oral Recommendation

A Go-To Potluck Dish

Is it a side salad? A salsa? A dessert? Who can say, but it’s delicious, not too expensive and will satisfy everyone at the potluck, regardless of their food sensitivities. It’s easy to make and scaleable. Co-created with Shelley Vairin in 2009.

A whole lot of avocados, diced

About the same amount of mangoes, diced

About half the amount of bananas, diced

Gingerly stir the dices together in a big serving bowl with a lot of lime juice, a few pinches of salt, and a couple tiny taps of cayenne (don’t overdo it here!). Don’t stir it so much that it becomes all one consistency, it should be chunky but squishy. If your mangoes and bananas aren’t super sweet, you can add a little sugar here, too.

Now, top it with a thick layer of shredded or flaked coconut. I prefer unsweetened, but you do you. Tap a little more cayenne on top of the coconut — again, not too much, but enough to give it a mysterious hint of red.

Serve with a big casserole spoon, next to the bags of chips all the slackers brought.

Voilà, you won the potluck!1