I don't necessarily disagree, but you're telling me that like any good Democrats they didn't really believe their own propaganda, it was all for show.
Your problem is that many -- indeed the vast majority -- did believe their own propaganda because, to them, it was true: "Ape" Lincoln and his "Black Republicans" threatened slavery enough to make secession "necessary".
The fact that Lincoln did not really threaten slavery makes secessionist propaganda a Big Lie which converts the "necessity" into pure, unadulterated at pleasure secession.
It's an important point in making the Confederacy illegitimate from Day One.
No more illegitimate than the claim by the Colonists that the British were "oppressing" them. The Canadians were under the exact same laws, but they didn't feel oppressed. The British Loyalists in the US also didn't feel oppressed.
So yeah, propaganda was spread to justify America's independence from the United Kingdom. Same stuff, different century.
Your problem is that many — indeed the vast majority — did believe their own propaganda because, to them, it was true: “Ape” Lincoln and his “Black Republicans” threatened slavery enough to make secession “necessary”.
The fact that Lincoln did not really threaten slavery makes secessionist propaganda a Big Lie which converts the “necessity” into pure, unadulterated at pleasure secession.
It’s an important point in making the Confederacy illegitimate from Day One.
Firstly there is no way of knowing whether the majority were motivated by protection of slavery....doubtful since a large majority did not own any....or by the feeling that they were being consistently taken advantage of and bilked out of a lot of money every year. That I find more likely because the economics would have been felt by everybody in the South whether they owned any slaves or not.
Of course whenever there is a bitter longstanding dispute like this, people’s feelings of antipathy toward their opponents takes over and there’s no doubt many in the South simply wanted to no longer have to put up with New Englanders....I can’t say I blame them.
We agree that slavery was not threatened in the US. That said, the Northern states did go out of their way to avoid enforcing the fugitive slave clause of the US Constitution and thus did break one of the terms of the deal they made with the Southern states when the Constitution was ratified. They thus provided a legitimate legal basis for the Southern states to say the Northern states had violated the compact.
Unilateral secession is the right of each state and this was entirely in keeping with the original intent of the States when they ratified the constitution.