Virtually EVERY Southerner? Do you know how many Southerners there are? Over 121 million and some of them had no ancestors in the antebellum South or during the war. Yet they (virtually) all tell/told (told who, you?) about having a home destroyed by the yankees in locations where there were no yankees? Please.
I didn't make up anything, although you certainly did with that "virtually all Southerners" claim. I quoted the Official Records of the War of Rebellion and primary sources from the day (William Gilmore Sims record of the destruction of Columbia, SC, diaries, letters, etc).
I am not placing ALL the blame for slavery on the north. My very first sentence was, "The north's economy was also dependent on slave-grown cotton." ALSO. ALSO. ALSO. That means both north and South shared in the blame. I mentioned the north's refusing to quit buying cotton (and thus ending slavery that way) because the north is portrayed as being oh, so concerned about the slaves and wanting to end slavery. That is not true. They could have done it without bloodshed, but they didn't want to give up the cotton, and the cotton derived money. At best, a handful of abolitionists wanted to end slavery, more or less. But basically, the north benefited from Southern slaves. (Did you know that a generation before the war, there were more anti-slavery societies in the South than in the north?)
Slaves were domiciled in the South because that's where the work was located. But slavery was PRESERVED by north and South -- in the South, which provided the location and work, and in the north, which provided the financing.
Here's an example. In 1860, The Virginia Life Insurance Company ran a newspaper ad (Richmond Post Dispatch) naming directors and such. One sentence of the ad is very telling: "The Chief object of the Company is to aid in retaining at home the immense amount of money which goes annually from our state for Life Premiums to Northern Companies." Yes, slaves were included among those who were insured by those northern companies.
Immense amount of money was going annually from Virginia to the north for insurance.....
Yes, Southern banks benefited from slavery, but not to the extent northern banks did.
Yes, they invading army murdered, maimed and stole. Of course not every single soldier, but the army as a whole. Do you know how "Spoons" Butler got his nickname? I think it was Jeffrey Rogers Hummel who documented in "Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War" that 50,000 Southern civilians were killed as a direct or indirect result of the war ... most by disease and many by the shelling of cities and towns by the union army.
I share no blame for the deterioration of the USA. I bled red, white and blue since before I was a preschooler, got choked up at the sight of Old Glory, sang the national anthem with feeling... My country left me, not the other way around. And no, "tribalism, factionalism whatever you call it by black or white" is NOT what is destroying this country. Leftism, socialism, is what's destroying the country. The kind of leftism that has resulted in the law to remove Confederate flags in VA cemeteries....
I don't venerate an age; I venerate the truth, and the truth has not been told about the north's war on Southerners -- which continued for generations after the fighting stopped. The victors write the history and they write it to make themselves look good and right, regardless of facts and truth. I'm not embittered, but I am certainly cynical in the face of all the gung-ho Americanism, greatest-country-on-earth when we haven't respected or lived by the Founders' principles for over 150 years. We're 20 trillion dollars in debt -- an incomprehensible amount that can never be repaid. We are decimating our military; we are being overrun by hostile lawbreakers who are draining our country's lifeblood. We are throwing out decency and morals and embracing vile immorality...
And in the face of that, some people get their knickers in a knot over the display of Confederate flags....
I'm not surprised you're done talking to me. I know more about it than you do.
ping
“I don’t venerate an age; I venerate the truth, and the truth has not been told about the north’s war on Southerners — which continued for generations after the fighting stopped. “
The northern war against the South began as early as the election of Thomas Jefferson, and the Essex Junto’s threat of New England secession. There were decades of hatemongering of the South that predated the outbreak of gunfire, not to mention northern funding for John Brown’s campaign of murder.
The best source for this ante-bellum campaign is Thomas Fleming’s “A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War”. Well worth your time.