WI Texas secedes but doesn't join the Confederacy?

Are you saying absolutely that states rights was exclusively the province of the slave owning south or that the slave owning south used it for exclusively for slavery?

Either position is wrong to varying degrees, IMO, but the 2nd less so, because slavery was the cause celeb for so many of the chief secessionists in the South, as demonstrated by their writings. The reason that the statement that the south's sole use of states' rights was about slavery ignores serious disagreements between the Southern state governments and Jeff Davis' central government that had nothing to do with slavery and everything to do with where the authority of the central government stopped and the state governments started. Below is in interesting and even handed review issues of states rights in the Confederacy. You can look at the comments and find that one or two even took your position.
https://cwcrossroads.wordpress.com/2011/03/26/the-confederacy-and-state-rights/


Dude, just say "slavery". ;)
 
the opening paragraph says it all: "One of the arguments one always hears is that the southern states seceded to protect state rights … sometimes as a way to counter claims that white southerners seceded to protect slavery. Anyone familiar with American history knows that white southerners were far more consistent in their protection of slavery than state rights, and that they had no problem violating state rights in their efforts to protect slavery, a clear recognition of the relationship of means (which might, or might not, include state rights) and ends (the protection of slavery). "

it starts out with an opinion, then lists nothing but pros for the opinion. that isn't even handed. that's presenting one side of an argument. even handed is 'on the one hand, the south did x, on the other hand the south did y'. in that article, there is no other hand, just one argument that bullspit on the notion of states rights being a cause.
 
To what extent was Texas dependent on overland support from the rest of the United States especially via the Confederate states.

If it was highly dependent on overland to the the Union, then was the Indian/Oklahoma Territory a sufficient link to maintain Texas or would Texas, cut off from the Union via the Confederacy, effectively need to become self-reliant and maybe even quasi-independent just because of a restriction on communicating with the government in Washington D.C.

Of course the Union blockade would relieve this, but is this still a restriction which may make Texas act as if independent?

Alternatively if Texas formally tries for independence would it be blockaded incidentally by the Union out of a Union fear of the Confederacy using Galveston or other Texan ports to circumvent the blockade?
 
To what extent was Texas dependent on overland support from the rest of the United States especially via the Confederate states.

Alternatively if Texas formally tries for independence would it be blockaded incidentally by the Union out of a Union fear of the Confederacy using Galveston or other Texan ports to circumvent the blockade?

IIRC, Because of the lack of railroads connecting Texas to the railroads back east, Texas' ports were the lifeblood up until around 1870 or so. That's not to say that you couldn't see a lot of overland trade, but w/out rails it lacks the cost efficiency allowed by sea trade. And, if an independent Texas didn't want to be blockaded by the Union, they would need to do more than just a token effort to curtail trade with the Confederacy.

Outside of some old land routes through the Confederacy, there really weren't any good routes north at that time. Having said that, it's not out of the realm of possibility to create them. That happened just a few years later with the cattle drives to northern markets. But economics factored into that, in that it was cheaper to send the cattle herds north overland than to drive them to Galveston or another Texas port and ship them by sea. So I guess an argument could be made that Texas could establish a trade route through Oklahoma to a railhead like St. Louis. But apart from cattle what does Texas have in 1860 that can be effectively shipped by land?
 
the south felt they were going to be dominated by the north in regards to states rights. we want it to be made about slavery, and while slavery was indeed the biggest issue of states rights, the secession was about states rights.

The weird thing is, despite how frequently it might be repeating (including by people with perfectly good intentions and no disposition to racism or Confederate apologism), it's not even right. The South seceded because the North successfully elected someone hostile to slavery without a single Southern electoral vote. They saw that the North could control the government completely without their input and thus be able to do whatever it wanted in the long run. The thing that broke the party system that had kept things together until then was the failure of southern Democrats to push through a territorial slave code over the objections of northern Democrats and the snafu surrounding Kansas, a thing decidedly about individual rights (to slave property), rather than state's rights.

Now, this was important because the South knew how vulnerable their position in the Senate was to free soil forces pushing through new free states out of the territories. You can then come around to the idea of a state's right to legalize slavery in its borders as what was under threat, so there's that tie in to state's rights, but that is almost entirely it. The South would have been perfectly capable of continuing to find Northern allies for other issues like the tariff (as, indeed, they would for the rest of the century), it was uniquely their concerns of increasing Northern hostility to slavery and increasing Northern ability to dominate the Federal government that drove secession.

What I can disagree with is wcv's assertion that this is significantly different from the American Revolution in character. Not only did the American colonies have representation in Parliament (through MPs who were all too happy to be paid to represent constituencies other than those that actually elected them -- There's a reason the late 18th century British Parliament was dominated by representatives of the sugar planters in the Caribbean despite not a single one of them being able to vote for an MP), but the South did indeed spend the 1840's and 1850's looking for iron clad guarantees of various kinds on the slavery issue on a political level, with occasional outbursts of resistance and violence to try to achieve them, just like the American colonies in the 1760's and early 1770's.
 
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