Who Gets to Decide the PRIMARY Cause of South Carolina's Secession and the War that Followed?

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James Lutzweiler

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Mar 14, 2018
Dear Posters,

I seek commentary from any of you on who gets to decide the PRIMARY cause of South Carolina's Secession and the War that followed. I do so in the context of many comments on a couple of posts in which I have read that slavery was the PRIMARY cause, hands down. It is not my objective to argue for my own viewpoint but to understand yours, if "PRIMARILY slavery" is your position. My impression is that the reason many people opt for this position is because of the Secession Declarations in which case I would assume that the answer to my question is, "The Seceshers themselves get the privilege of saying what was PRIMARY." If that is the case, a simple answer to this post would be "SC's Seceshers, period. They get to decide. No peer review necessary. No second guessing. No presentism. No pastism either" --by which I mean to say that posters are also ruling out other contemporaneous antebellum literature that might call into question the truthfulness or accuracy of those Declarations.

In short, I am asking you to put yourselves in the shoes of an 1860 Professor of History, let's say a Professor with a PhD in a German university, who would put a letter grade on SC's Declarations, if they were turned in to him for a term paper.

If not the Seceshers themselves, then who gets to decide? A majority of present day historians? Posters on this thread? Who? Who gets to decide what was the PRIMARY cause of all of this? And if it is so simple as that, i.e., just to say the Seceshers themselves, how is it that so many other books have been written citing other causes? Why is there not universal agreement, if slavery is such a simple no-brainer of an answer?

Ah, but that mires me in multiple questions. I intend only one of which all these others are simply cognate: Who gets to decide?

James
 
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