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Re:Cannabis is legal in most America but federal laws block ... by tyre on Saturday December 24, 2022 @11:21AM (#34118264)
No, the US fought a war over slavery.

The "states' rights" framing of the US Civil War skips over which specific right the southerns states were willing to die for. It wasn't abstract, though it was papered over as such.

The history of later southern political leaders (e.g. Richard Russell) confirms that the fundamental issue was the enslavement (ideal, for them) or segregation and oppression of blacks in the US.

Which isn't to say that the state vs. federal power struggle of constitutional interpretation isn't still happening. These cases rise to the SCOTUS regularly. The US Civil War, however, wasn't that.

Re:Cannabis is legal in most America but federal laws block ... by Spooky23 on Saturday December 24, 2022 @11:40AM (#34118442)
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Re:Cannabis is legal in most America but federal laws block ... by nonethewiser on Saturday December 24, 2022 @11:25AM (#34118294)
> No, the US fought a war over slavery.

Seems to me these aren't mutually exclusive. I find your argument to be overly concerned with injustice of slavery. No one is defending it. And the southern states absolutely did not want to adhere to the laws set by the northern states.

Re:Cannabis is legal in most America but federal laws block ... by sidlls on Saturday December 24, 2022 @11:36AM (#34118406)
The context is important: southern states were fighting specifically for the right to continue to enslave people. Any argument that doesn't focus on slavery in the context of the civil war we had isn't valid, or at least is incomplete, because it elides the reason for the war in the first place.
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Re:Cannabis is legal in most America but federal laws block ... by sidlls on Saturday December 24, 2022 @01:15PM (#34119452)
You're conflating a number of completely unrelated items, at least: individual motivations, catalysts, and the broad-strokes reasons a group fights in a war.

The civil war was fought because the southern states wanted to maintain their slave economy. It is as clear, cut and dried as that. Individual southerners may have fought for glory, for Suzy to love them, for money, or for any other reason, but the prosecutors of the war effort for the south did it because their economy was dependent on slaves and they wanted that to continue. It's not disingenuous to state that.

Re:Cannabis is legal in most America but federal laws block ... by kneebonian on Saturday December 24, 2022 @01:38PM (#34119695)
Your wrong. The Civil war was fought because the confederate states of America fired on Fort Sumter, the establishment of the confederacy the freeing of the slaves all of those happened as a consequence or prior to the actual war.

If you want to get that reductive than I am right. The Civil war happened because the Confederate States of America fired on Fort Sumter and everything else was ancillary. Just like WW1 happened because the Archduke Franz Ferdinand got assassinated.

Youre argument is overly reductive and your ignorant of history

Re:Cannabis is legal in most America but federal laws block ... by Retric on Saturday December 24, 2022 @11:31AM (#34118357)
It’s mutually exclusive because it wasn’t the internal rights of individual states that set off the civil war, but the question of which way western states would be. In other words southern states wanted to impose rules on the union outside their borders.

Florida trying to tell California what to do is by definition not a states rights issue.

Re:Cannabis is legal in most America but federal laws block ... by dragonwriter on Saturday December 24, 2022 @11:29AM (#34118330)
> Seems to me these aren't mutually exclusive

In the abstract, they are not.

Its just that the slavery explanation is factually true and the other is false, though it represents part of one sides propaganda (and more strongly that of the retrospective sympathizers of that side than the actual side, which was quite explicit about slavery specifically as the motivation.)

Re:Cannabis is legal in most America but federal laws block ... by fineIllregister on Saturday December 24, 2022 @12:57PM (#34119237)
> And the southern states absolutely did not want to adhere to the laws set by the northern states.

To add to the sibling comments, the southern states hated states' rights when northern states were liberating escaped slaves within their jurisdiction. The Fugitive Slave Act immediately destroys any argument that the Civil War was about states' rights.

Re:Cannabis is legal in most America but federal laws block ... by AlbertCory on Saturday December 24, 2022 @11:43AM (#34118476)
It ended up being about slavery (with the Emancipation Proclamation), and slavery was the root cause for the hatred between the states. They were also very different societies. Almost no immigrants moved to the South, for instance, and there wasn't nearly as much industry.

As another thread points out, if slavery was prohibited in all the new states from the West, it would be game over in Congress, and the slave states knew it. Hence the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

That said: "save the Union" was a much bigger motivator for Union soldiers than "abolish slavery." That's what made them volunteer.

For the Southern soldiers who mostly did not own any slaves, it was more "defending our homes and our way of life" than "states' rights."

In other words, it's more nuanced than you present.

Re:Cannabis is legal in most America but federal laws block ... by flagsrule on Saturday December 24, 2022 @11:52AM (#34118572)
The civil war was not fought over slavery. The union chose to free the slaves because it hurt the south economically more than it hurt the north economically.
Re:Cannabis is legal in most America but federal laws block ... by ffggffggj on Saturday December 24, 2022 @12:00PM (#34118655)
Sorry, this is simply not true. The declarations of secession explicitly spell this out. You are welcome to read them yourself, here is one for example https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp

Mississippi’s is even more explicit https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp - “Our position is thoroughly identified with slavery — the greatest material interest of the world”

The civil war was fought because slave states wanted to force slavery on other parts of our country, outside their own borders.