re: Civil War Confederate veteran interview

quote:

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It wasn’t the average southerner that plunged the south into secession and civil war, however. The elites were the ones calling the shots. They all owned slaves. Men like the guy in the OP were simply the pawns.

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This strikes me as a rhetorical move to pry southerners away from defending the Confederacy, but it’s not literally true and to the extent that it has truth to it, it basically applies to any government or state. Would you say that the elites in the North plunged the North into war and national empire, or do you think that these things were aspirations of the common Northerner?

The South seceded by state conventions that were legitimate as far as any government is capable of legitimacy, and Southerners were committed to defending their new legitimate independence as far as I’ve read. There need not have been a war but for the North not allowing the Southern states to leave. The confederacy negotiated for peace. So, if anything, the northern elite (really the Republicans) plunged the entire former US into war.

So if the elite are responsible for plunging the common man into war, this is not specific to the South and its elite but is much more applicable to the US northern elite, there was no war but for their insistence upon denying legitimate independence.