THE CIVIL WAR, SLAVERY AND SUCCESSION

  

             The civil war is commonly portrayed in history books as having two purposes. The first was to end slavery in the south and the second was to re-unite America. Both of these clauses were either unnecessary, or outright wrong. The big one is slavery. Slaves from Africa were used in the southern states as free labor on plantations. Such a practice was an abomination towards human rights and was utterly unjustifiable in any circumstances. This was a big propaganda tool for the North during the Civil War. It was said that we had to invade the south and free the slaves. The thing is, every country that had made slavery illegal had done so without bloodshed. England had anti-slavery champions such as William Wilberforce. America had the great abolitionists Fredrick Douglas and Lysander Spooner. If the abolitionists in congress had continued to press the issue and held out, then it is very doubtful that slavery would have survived. Instead hundreds of thousands of people died and the economy was pushed to the very brink of ruin. While it was an absolute necessity to free the slaves, it could have been achieved without such great losses.
            The second reason given for the necessity of the civil war was to maintain the unity of America. This is perhaps the greatest act of hypocrisy I have seen. The Southern states were doing the exact thing that the colonists had been doing almost a century before hand. In order to compete with Englands trade with the south, congress passed laws allowing higher tariffs driving prices up, just as England had hiked up taxes on the colonies. The south, fed up with government intervention decided to split from the union. Just as King George III called the rebels 'traitors, so the north dubbed the south.The situation was the same for the south and the revolutionaries because although they were called 'traitors' they were not traitors by definition. They did not betray anyone or break any kind of  official contractual agreement. Their relationship with the King/Government was purely voluntary as such it is incorrect to deem these men and women 'traitors.' These people for their own reason whether wise or unwise choose to enact their natural right to leave an organization that they had no contractual obligation to. When they did this they committed no more treason (which implies treachery, deceit, breaking of an agreement) leaving the union than if they left a church, or university for another.
                I do not believe that who you are should be determined by where you are born, something you have absolutely no control over at birth. Just as you cannot choose your gender, ethnicity, or parents, you cannot decide what country you want to be born in, and the fact that you are forced to be an American just because of something you had no control over is ridiculous. If you want to stay American that's fine. If you want to secede and go to Canada then that's your prerogative. But the fact that the government can say "no you have to stay an American" is wrong and an invasion of personal liberty.