I've been thinking about

 

Self-determination.

 

We in the United States are great champions of self-determination.  Nations are sovereign.  They have the right to freely choose their government with no outside interference.  We have institutionalized the concept.  It’s part of the Monroe Doctrine.  It’s part of the charter of the United Nations.

 

Let the people of any country vote and do what they want.  We don’t want some foreign power dictating what we should do.  We don’t want an illegitimate government imposing its power over people that didn’t ask for it.  We take the moral high ground.  We support the rebels in Syria wanting to be freed from the dictator.  We supported the Contra rebels in Nicaragua wanting to escape the Sandinista government.  We root for the underdog, the people wanting to form their own union.  We broke away from Britain to form ours.  People have the right to choose their own government.  In fact, the U.S. supported the secession of Texas from Mexico, and once Texas became a state, fought a war with Mexico to defend it.

 

 

Then I wonder my way back to our Civil War.  An entire segment of the United States, eleven states, chose to secede from the Union and form their own alliance; the Confederacy.  That’s what the people of the South decided.  They didn’t like our form of federal government and wanted something different.  As a practical matter, it would have been inconvenient for the North to lose the agrarian economy of the South that balanced the manufacturing economy of the North, but it would have honored the principle of self-determination that we so strongly believe in.  If the South wanted to leave, why didn’t the North respect the right of self-determination, let them go, and wish them well?

 

Why was there a Civil War; the War Between the States; the Southern War for Independence?  Sure, there was slavery.  Slavery became part of the civil war, but really, secession was a completely different issue.  The North didn’t go to war against the South because they suddenly discovered the South had slaves; some of the northern states had slaves too.  The North didn’t want the South to leave.  If the South hadn’t had any slaves, the North still wouldn’t have wanted them to leave.

 

Slavery is a terrible institution.  I would never defend it.  I’m just trying to separate the issues.  We grew up in the west, thinking that the War Between the States was unavoidable, and Lincoln is the hero who kept our union together.  That might be true, I don’t know that it’s not, but I still have this wonder:  Why was it a given that the North had to force the South to stay in a club they didn’t want to be a part of?