About

"States' Rights To What?" is a popular rhetorical question and response to the phrase "The Civil War was about states' rights." Specifically, it expresses the view that the American Civil War was caused by a dispute over slavery, a viewpoint most modern-day historians and politicians share, rather than a dispute over states' rights, which is considered a minority viewpoint. The expected answer to the question is "states' rights to slavery," thus contradicting the narrative that the Civil War was not about slavery.

Online, the phrase combination is often used in object-labeling and comparison formats.

Origin

The cause of the American Civil war has been debated ever since the war took place from 1861 to 1865. Ever since, a vocal minority of people in the U.S. insist that the war was about states' rights. Common points of evidence used to prove that the war was about slavery include the Cornerstone Speech,^[1] the South Carolina Declaration of Secession^[2] and Alexander H. Stephen's letter to Abraham Lincoln. An example of the discourse on the issue in video form was published by journalist Robert Maguire on September 17th, 2018, where it gained 61,100 likes and 23,100 retweets over three years (shown below).

Siri, show me the easiest own of all time pic.twitter.com/71o48iLzKs

— Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) September 13, 2018

The first instance of this specific phrase to describe the state of events comes from James McPherson,^[3] a historian, who in 2007 stated:

Of all these interpretations [of the Civil War], the states'-rights argument is perhaps the weakest. It fails to ask the question, states' rights for what purpose? States' rights, or sovereignty, was always more a means than an end, an instrument to achieve a certain goal more than a principle.

Memes have also been made on the topic for many years, even though the specific phrase didn't see any use until later in mainstream meme culture. The following examples, which each have had their original sources removed, appeared in 2012 and 2017 respectively, but the very first instances remains unknown.

Spread

The first meme using the phrase was posted to Twitter by @8Alton8^[4] on September 25th, 2018, using the format from Kaiba’s Defeat. It gained 3,000 likes and 1,000 retweets over three years (shown below).

The meme slowly gained traction throughout the following years with an NPC version being posted to the subreddit r/HistoryMemes by a now-deleted Redditor^[5] on May 4th, 2019, gaining 10,900 points in six months (shown below).

A Star Wars variant was posted to the same subreddit on December 2nd of that year by Redditor^[6] u/RealWakandaDPRK, gaining 84,300 points in six months (shown below).

Various Examples

Search interest

References