For Decades, Southern States Saw Thanksgiving as an Act of Northern Aggression

Native Utahn here. 4th of July seems just the same here as it does anywhere else i've lived. We basically just have a round 2 on pioneer day.

There is just as much "ugh" in saying that it was about slavery instead of state's rights. Either way, you're leaving out important things. This misleads by oversimplification.

You'd be better off saying it was about geography! There is a band of soil running along today's black belt that is unusually good for growing certain labor-intensive crops, particularly cotton. That lead to a non-industrial economy. Meanwhile, water power to operate machinery was widely available in New England.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Belt_(U.S._region)

So right off, you have a huge conflict over things like tariffs, and you'd have that even without adding the issue of slaves. The north preferred to have tariffs on manufactured goods, and the south preferred to have them on raw materials. The "state's right" in question was actually the nullification of a tariff.

BTW, the usual story about slavery in the USA also leaves out the awkwardness of stuff like this slave owner:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Johnson_(colonist)

> The fact remains that as a whole the Union still had slaves, and that didn't change for the entirety of the Civil War.

If you believe in rule of law, this makes complete sense. They had no way to outlaw slavery without an amendment.

> My point is there's obviously things going on here other than just a war to end slavery, and it's important not to downplay that either.

It is true that the USA would have held onto slavery a little longer without succession. But the South read the writing on the wall, it was going to be outlawed sooner or later, so they decided to rebel.

The South wouldn't have succeeded if slavery wasn't in danger of going away, the Union wouldn't have fought the South if the South hadn't succeeded. But yes, slavery was the cause of all of this, even if indirect.

> FWIW, I'd call Seattle "the West".

My white Vicksburg classmates called me a yankee even though I was born out west, it didn't matter if Washington wasn't even a state at the time. As long as I had that standard midwestern accent (the one that the west and midwest basically have), the west not being the north wasn't relevant. (Ironically enough, my friends from Boston were even more racist than my southern white friends, but that is a story for another time)

Another obscure Thanksgiving fact:

Thanksgiving is commonly known as a celebration of a good harvest, but the reason why the harvest was good is seldom remembered.

Plymouth Colony was originally communal. Marx was far from the first to think that "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" might be a good idea. Such thinking dates back to Plato at least, and in 1620 the colony actually tried it. Nobody wanted to do the work, though everybody had needs. After 2.5 years, with half the colony dead, Plymouth governor William Bradford decided to prioritize survival over the ideals of socialism. The resulting harvest was plentiful, giving reason to celebrate Thanksgiving.

https://www.forbes.com/2008/11/27/thanksgiving-economy-histo...

It's a lesson people are starting to forget. We'll probably try again, and maybe somehow things won't turn out the same as every previous time.

Saying it was about slavery is also misleading (although less so than just saying states rights). At the time the civil war started, the North was willing to compromise on the issue of slavery [0]. The North did not fight to abolish slavery. Had the South surrendered earlier (or never seceded at all), they would have been able to keep their slaves [1]. The reason the North fought was to preserve the union (apparently not an answer on the citizenship test).

I actually think that preserving the Union is, in some sense, a more technically correct answer, since the South did not start the war [2]. The South declared its independence. The North started the war to prevent the South from gaining its independence [3].

As an aside. Independent of my actual interperatation of history, I think it would be highly unreasonable to deny citizenship to someone for holding a controversial belief that is shared by a significant portion of the country. Like it or not "states rights" is an American interpretation of the Civil war, even if it is one that is not historically accurate. And we really do not want the government to be in a position of dictating the "correct" history.

[0] You could argue about how trustworthy the North was. I would argue the main cause of the Civil war was that the South lost confidence that the North was (or would continue) to compromise on this issue.

[1] At least for a while. With hindsight, I am sure that slavery would have eventually been abolished in the South as well, and it probably would have been the North that was the primary political force behind it.

[2] Fine, they did open the attack of Fort Sumter when the Union refused to withdraw. You could therefor argue that the South did technically start the war, but I find that to be a bit of a stretch.

[3] As I mentioned above, this was the primary motivation of the North. The North, at the start, did not continue this sentence with "...so that they could abolish slavery".