Nah. Irish and Scots were the chattel race before it became nice and easy to identify people by color. Everything white people have done to Africa and the Americas, the English had already been practicing on us for a thousand years by that point. The only reason Irish people are considered white is because we had black people to compare ourselves to.
The funny thing is that the people who always talk about how the Civil War wasn’t really about slavery and was about states’ rights, are actually right, but for exactly the wrong reasons.
Firstly, it was the South who was opposed to states’ rights. They wanted the federal government to return runaway slaves who made it to free states, while the North wanted states to be allowed to decide that for themselves.
And was the war really about slavery? For the South, it absolutely was- It’s mentioned in virtually every single official statement declaring secession. It was literally named as one of the central tenets of the Confederate government. It was inarguably the single greatest reason for the secession and the single greatest reason for them to fight to stay separate.
But Lincoln is literally on record saying that his primary goal was to preserve the union, and either abolishing or maintaining slavery would be fine if it accomplished that.
Sure, abolishing slavery was a great moral justification (like the evils of communism or rescuing the Kurds), but I think the narrative of the great and noble Union abolitionists valiantly rushing to free their fellow man gives us way too much credit. I’m pretty sure it really boiled down to the same wealthy aristocrats looking after territory, trade, and taxes as every other war in our history.
Then again, I am fed up with our species at this point and just embracing the cynicism.
