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“There are not many of you who believe that the wrong side won our Civil War”

“You have no real reason to believe that a CSA wouldn’t have grown into a powerful, bloated bureaucracy on its own.”

Well those are your imaginings since I don’t recall stating my opinion on either one.

It’s not likely that the CSA would have become a centralized bureaucratic state. It was an agrarian society with a different culture than the Northeast. And 150 years after the War the South still isn’t plagued by the busybody mentality found in the Northeast, unless it’s inflicted on them by the heirs of that same crowd entrenched in Washington DC. That particular self-righteous yankee mindset didn’t go away after the Civil War it just channeled itself into new ideas that the rest of the country must obey, gay marriage being their latest enthusiasm. It’s not a coincidence that the Northeast is the bastion of liberal and leftist politics in America.

The wrong side of the Civil War is the belief that it was good or necessary. Had Lincoln let the seven Deep South states secede in peace they would have just been a larger version of the Republic of Texas, and the Republic of Texas had already discovered that it was hard to go it alone. The much smaller CSA would have had to come to an accommodation with the USA.

The CSA’s one major asset would have been control of Mississippi river traffic accessing the Gulf. But the seven member CSA also had a major problem built into its geography. It had a one thousand mile border with the remaining US states and runaways could simply cross into the US instead of heading for Canada. With the Deep South gone the US Congress could vote to end slavery in 1861. The CSA would have been confronted with a porous border as well as the economic rationale for slavery coming to an end.

Slavery ended all over the western hemisphere without war except in the case of Lincoln. The death and destruction of the Civil War was entirely unnecessary for ending slavery, it was mandatory only for Lincoln’s desire to force an unwilling population to remain in a union it no longer wanted to be part of.

I'm not going to waste time with your claim that the South has natural reasons for wanting less government than the North. I have shown you the facts - the South has shown a larger appetite than the North for government handouts and welfare. Those are just facts. They might not conform with what you want to believe, but they are facts.

It was the advent of the 16th Amendment's income tax that gave the Federal government the fiscal boost that it needed to grow into the monster that it is today. And, I have shown you that it was the Southern states who were at the front of the line to ratify that amendment. In my lifetime, it was the Southern Democrats who chaired all the large Congressional committees because the South had a tendency to re-elect the same representatives over and over again, giving them seniority.

The South has not, by its nature, demonstrated any strong desire for small government in the area of welfare or national defense. The South is at least as responsible as any other section of our country for the size of our Federal Government. These are facts that you need to accept to understand our history and our present circumstances. If you want to delude yourself, you can remain unhappy and bewildered for just as long as you wish. It's your choice. But the facts are pretty plain. So long as the South is receiving more than it is paying to the Federal government, don't be looking for any stampede toward the gates.

You conclude your remarks with the suggestion that it was wrong for Lincoln "to force an unwilling population to remain in a Union it no longer wanted to be part of." Nothing could be more clear than that right now, the South wants no part of "secession" and is grateful that the South is part of the USA. They are also grateful to Lincoln and to the Union for protecting the integrity of this nation and its borders and they are grateful that Lincoln and the Union ended slavery in this country. In fact, I think that they wished that we had had presidents in the last 50 years who protected our national borders with the same resolve shown by Lincoln.

Had Lincoln let the seven Deep South states secede in peace they would have just been a larger version of the Republic of Texas, and the Republic of Texas had already discovered that it was hard to go it alone. The much smaller CSA would have had to come to an accommodation with the USA.

Which is exactly why Jefferson Davis chose to fire on Fort Sumter. Without war, the Upper South, and especially Virginia, would not have gone for secession and the cotton state slave republic Davis had would have quickly choaked on their slaves and lack of resources asside from cotton.

They needed the Upper South to survive, and they needed war to get the Upper South.