Top products from r/stateball

We found 2 product mentions on r/stateball. We ranked the 2 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.

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Top comments that mention products on r/stateball:

u/AeroEcti · 15 pointsr/stateball

In case you've been living under a rock since 2007: Click Here

Until then, stay out of my territory.

u/ReckZero · 0 pointsr/stateball

I know, but it's fun to talk about these things. Plus I want to get this saved somewhere so I can use it on my Libertarian friends.

Everything about the war was about slavery. What you had was a pervasive, white-superiority culture (that generally pervaded the nation at the time, but especially slave states) that believed that white men were freed to be wealthy, productive aristocrats who could be thinkers, intellectuals and equals to European courtiers by being given the free time they needed to pursue these things on the backs of black slave labor. By given white men the freedom to not be "wage slaves," as they claimed northern men were by working in factories, they were given the chance to truly pursue their superiority. Even poor whites agreed this was a goal, either through loyalty, racism or just conformity to local culture. Everyone sought to protect this at all costs.

State sovereignty was a defense of the right of slave states to continue to own and exploit slaves. This neo-Confederate belief that it has to do with states rights is a construction to water down the fact that these states' citizens, almost uniformly, extolled the virtues of slavery every chance they got. It became such a contentious issue that every time a new state was admitted into the union, it had to have another state of opposing view on the matter added as well to maintain balance. In the case of Kansas, Missouri (Which had a much lower slave ownership rate than even Texas did - 8 percent to Texas's 28 percent at the time of the war) mobilized men to cross the border and stuff ballots to ensure the state entered the Union pro-slavery. Blood was shed in the process. This inter-state war can be considered the first major fight of the Civil War.

Further, after the start of the war, it was an express objective of Southern leadership to eventually establish a pro-slave empire across the Americas, beginning with Cuba. Cuba had experienced a number of invasions of these American military expeditions before the war. Invaders were called filibusters.

I think the strongest evidence of this is in the way Confederate forces treated black prisoners of war: They were usually enslaved, sometimes executed, on the spot. This treatment spurred outrage from Northerners, even back then.

I'd recommend the Battlecry of Freedom, by James McPhearson. The first half is devoted to the political situation and motivations of the war. It's well documented that the South had slavery and belief in the value of slavery as a primary motivator, and this was true across the board. Few Southerners would have denied this at the time. Any claim they weren't is after-the-fact revisionism. The rest of the book is a narrative of the battles, which is fun to read.