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I have provided plenty of evidence that the protection and expansion of slavery was a primary Southern motivation for secession.

You're turning this into the filioque controversy all over again. The difference is that these issues were a prime motive in Southern politics in the antebellum period, but they were not the primary motivator of secession. The primary motivator of secession was not getting waxed across the board, on all issues, and becoming a colonial economy under the heel of manifestly hostile economic and political interests in other states. The evidence of this shift of motive from the time of the Lecompton controversy to the eve of secession has been propounded to you, it has been documented to you. You insist, however, on retailing for polemical effect discredited Marxist arguments about economic determinism and "it was all about slavery", because you see the slavery issue as a good moral issue for beating the South over the head.

I've told you why the Marxists peddle their line -- and yet, utterly oblivious, blinded by your regionalist opprobrium, you embrace their argument out of animus. You deny the animus, but your vitriol uncovers you.

You have repeatedly shown that you care less what the issues were, than in pushing your beef. We exist. Get over it. Southerners aren't going to eat rat poison because you don't like our old flag, don't like the way we talk, and don't like the fact that people drive around with (full) gun racks in their pickup trucks.

On this thread, other active threads, and many long inactive threads, I have provided quotations from the southern leadership which show conclusively the link between slavery and secession.

Showing a link and then leaping to the conclusion that the Marxists are correct are two different propositions.

Jefferson Davis didn't open fire on Fort Sumter because it was full of Abolitionists, or because there were slaves there, or runaway slaves. His motive was power politics -- the establishment of the Confederacy. It was not about slavery, it was about self-determination. Lincoln's motive was complementary, antagonistic -- and largely unacknowledged by a historiographical college of priests who leap on every recension of Lincoln's policy agenda, to defend him and the moral capital that has been sunk in his glorification.

"The primary motivator of secession was not getting waxed across the board, on all issues, and becoming a colonial economy under the heel of manifestly hostile economic and political interests in other states. The evidence of this shift of motive from the time of the Lecompton controversy to the eve of secession has been propounded to you, it has been documented to you. You insist, however, on retailing for polemical effect discredited Marxist arguments about economic determinism and "it was all about slavery", because you see the slavery issue as a good moral issue for beating the South over the head."

I will admit that you are well-schooled in blending revisionist history (from the James Garfield Randall school) with more modern marxist polemics. But your argument falls flat when the words of those who led secession are reviewed. And I don't mean their post-war apologies. I mean the very words they used at the time to justify to the southerners why they were taking the actions they took. Your "it was all about slavery" strawman fails, because you constantly link it to northern motivation as well.

"You have repeatedly shown that you care less what the issues were, than in pushing your beef. We exist. Get over it. Southerners aren't going to eat rat poison because you don't like our old flag, don't like the way we talk, and don't like the fact that people drive around with (full) gun racks in their pickup trucks."

You need to sniff some vapors, dearie, you're getting hysterical. I have ZERO animus toward southerners. I am married to a southerner. I have lived and worked in the south (if you want to consider Texas a part of the south). I am descended, in part, from southerners. I couldn't care less about the old flags - they are part of a heritage. And I couldn't care less about your vehicles and how you are armed. (In fact, the more arms the better!)

You would be hard-pressed to find a post by me that denigrates southern culture. Or find a post where I denigrate the confederate soldier or sailor who served honorably. You will find plenty of posts where I take exception to those who glorify the treasonable actions of those who led the southern rebellion. And you will find plenty of posts by me where I slam those who were unfaithful to the founding principles of the nation.

Perhaps that is too fine a distinction for you to understand.

"It was not about slavery, it was about self-determination.

What did the ardent fire-eater Robert Barnwell Rhett have to say about the issue, just before the Presidential election, on October 11, 1860?

"With the control of the Government of the United States, and an organized and triumphant North to sustain them, the Abolitionists will renew their operations upon the south with increased courage. The thousands in every country, who look up to power, and make gain out of the future, will come out in support of the Abolition government.... They will have an Abolition Party in the South, of Southern men. The contest for slavery will no longer be one between the North and the South. It will be in the South, between the people of the South.

"If, in our present position of power and unitedness, we have the raid of John Brown ... what will be the measures of insurrection and incendiarism, which must follow our notorious and abject prostration to Abolition rule at Washington, with all the patronage of the Federal Government, and a Union organization in the South to support it?...

"Already there is uneasiness throughout the South, as to the stability of its institution of slavery. But with submission to the rule of Abolitionists at Washington, thousands of slaveholders will despair of the institution. While the condition of things in the Frontier States will forces their slaves on the markets of the Cotton States, the timid in the Cotton States, will also sell their slaves. The general distrust, must affect purchasers. The consequence must be, slave property must be greatly depreciated....

"The ruin of the South, by the emancipation of her slaves, is not like the ruin of any other people. it is not a mere loss of liberty, like the Italians under the Bourbons. It is not heavy taxation, which must still leave the means of living, or otherwise taxation defeats itself. But it is the loss of liberty, property, home, country - everything that makes life worth having. And this loss will probably take place under circumstances of suffering and horror, unsurpassed in the history of nations. We must preserve our liberties and institutions, under penalties greater than those which impend over any people in the world."

Rhett's admonition - Slavery must be protected! For without their slaves, the South would face economic ruin, loss of liberty and property, infiltration by northern abolitionists, collaboration by southern abolitionists, and they would be worse off than the Italians!

I thought watie said "slavery was dying" and "only 5-6% of the southern population even cared about slavery"? This Lincoln feller must have scared Rhett silly. Or was Rhett just laying the last of his 30-year foundation for secession?

It was about slavery.