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Earlier I had corrected the misinformation that you spread when you said that the puritans "burned" witches.

Must have missed it. Yeah, we know they hung them and drowned them and what not, but people generally think of "burning witches" when they think of "witch trials." The main point is that their "Holier than thou" attitude is real, and they used to kill "witches". Your point is trivial.

Do yourself a favor and search "the burning of Francis McIntosh". Seems y'all had some mighty peculiar mindset of your own. Makes me really proud that Abe kicked the living s**t out of y'all, from north to south, from east to west, over hills and mountains and lakes....

Oh. We're going to do the childish "Well your side did it too!" thing.

We're also going to ignore the fact that the entire society and legal system of Massachusetts was behind the systematic persecution of people in "witch trials" and subsequent murders of innocent people, but were going to equate it to the random criminal acts initiated by angry mobs, years apart, and in entirely different regions, and with likely far more reasonable cause.

Makes me really proud that Abe kicked the living s**t out of y'all, from north to south, from east to west, over hills and mountains and lakes....

Not my folk. We didn't get here until after 1900, and we never lived in a Southern State.

I'm objective. I don't have a personal dog in the fight. That's why I can see it for what it really was. A murderous conquest. An oppression. A killing of innocent people who just wanted to be free of control from Washington D.C.

The more I look at it, the more I realize it was about money. The money New England would lose if Southern ports obtained dominance in the trade traffic with Europe.

I think understanding this money business is probably over your head, so i'm not going to waste a lot of time trying to explain it to you.

But the same forces that oppressed them, are oppressing us today. The United States is ran from New York.

The media there steer the elections, and the Donors there give the politician their marching orders.

This is why electing a Republican congress has achieved nothing. The New York Washington corridor is where the real power in this nation lies.

DiogenesLamp: "I'm objective.
I don't have a personal dog in the fight.
That's why I can see it for what it really was."

But you are obviously not "objective".
You've been drinking pro-Confederate koolaid by the gallon, and it's rotting your brain.
The result is you invent ludicrous fantasies that never happened while ignoring actual history which did happen.

DiogenesLamp: "A murderous conquest.
An oppression.
A killing of innocent people who just wanted to be free of control from Washington D.C."

No, a tragic war premeditated, provoked, started, formally declared and prosecuted by Confederates against the United States, long before any significant response from the Union Army.

Perhaps it would help you to remember that Confederate President Jefferson Davis had been not only a United States Senator, but also a former Secretary of War ('53-57 under Pierce).
In the 1847 Mexican War, Davis, a West Point graduate, had served with great distinction as regimental colonel, under command of his father-in-law, future President Zachary Taylor.
At war's end, Davis was offered promotion to general, but turned it down, accepting instead, appointment to fill a vacant US Senate seat.

From his extensive military & political experience, Davis judged Northern leaders frightened, weak-willed and unable to make a serious military response.
He believed that a major show of force should be enough to force weak Northerners to back down and give his new Confederacy whatever they demanded.
So in early March, 1861, Davis called up 100,000 troops (versus 17,000 in the US Army), and ordered preparations for military assault on Fort Sumter.
That would show them!

But Davis had never met, and knew nothing about Abraham Lincoln.

Lawyer Lincoln's only military command experience was as militia captain during the Black Hawk war (1832).
And Lincoln's top concern was not money, as you've so often asserted, but rather his oath of office: "to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution."
He was also determined, and so publically announced, that if war came, it would not be the Union starting war.

So Lincoln hoped to maintain peaceful relations with the new Confederacy, however, he did not agree with President Buchanan abandoning all US forts, ships, arsenals & mints to Confederates.
Lincoln was determined to hold the two major Federal assets which remained: Fort Pickens at Pensacola, Florida and Fort Sumter at Charleston.
Just as President Buchanan had in January, Lincoln in April, 1861, ordered resupply missions to those two forts, and just as Buchanan had in January, Lincoln's missions were met with violence from Confederates.
But in April, Confederate violence was orders of magnitude higher than previous, a military assault on Fort Sumter which was clearly an act of war against the United States.

So Lincoln went to the Federal "play book" which had been developed many years earlier as response to potential rebellion-insurrections.
He called up 75,000 troops to retake the lost forts, and ordered General Winfield Scott's "Anaconda Plan" to blockade Southern ports.

Davis responded by formally declaring war on the United States, calling up another 400,000 troops (500,000 total), sending military aid to pro-Confederates in Union Missouri, and ordering military supplies (ships, guns, ammo) from abroad.

As Lincoln said in his second inaugural:

"On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war.
All dreaded it, all sought to avert it.

While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war--seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation.
Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came."

I think that's as close to the truth of the matter as anyone can get.

[HandyDandy]: Earlier I had corrected the misinformation that you spread when you said that the puritans "burned" witches.

[DiogenesLamp]: Must have missed it. Yeah, we know they hung them and drowned them and what not, but people generally think of "burning witches" when they think of "witch trials." The main point is that their "Holier than thou" attitude is real, and they used to kill "witches". Your point is trivial.

Re the "Holier than thou" attitude of Puritans. Here is what Texas Senator Wigfall said in Congress on March 2, 1861:

...then Cromwell had to run them [the Puritans] out of England; and then they went over to Holland, and the Dutch let them alone, but would not let them persecute anybody else; and then they got on that ill-fated ship called the Mayflower and landed on Plymouth Rock. And from that time to this, they have been kicking up a dust generally, and making a mess whenever they could put their fingers in the pie.

They confederated with the other states to save themselves from the power of old King George III; and no sooner than they had gotten rid of him than they turned to persecuting their neighbors. Having got rid of the Indians, and witches, and Baptists, and Quakers in their country; after selling us our negroes for the love of gold, they began stealing them back for the love of God.

That is the history as well as I understand it.

Wigfall was quite a character. Let's check some of his charges.

Indians? The Indian reference refers to things like King Philip's War where the Puritan colonists basically wiped out the Indians in much of New England and made slaves of the ones they captured.

Witches? "During the witchcraft hysteria that swept through Massachusetts in 1692, more than 400 persons underwent the horror of being accused of practicing witchcraft. Of these, nineteen were hanged, and one old man who refused to enter a plea at his trial was pressed to death as the sheriff and his men piled weights on him to force him to do so." [Source: "The Witchcraft Hysteria of 1692" by Leo Bonfanti. 1994, New England Historical Series]

Quakers? The Puritans in Massachusetts banned and hung Quakers. See: [Link]. Also "Quakers were whipped, had their ears shaved off, and their tongues bored through with a hot iron." [Link]

Baptists? The Puritans banned people like Roger Williams and excommunicated Obadiah Holmes for Baptist activity. The political/religious correctness in Massachusetts at the time reached Harvard College (big surprise). The Reverend Mr. Charles Chauncey "was invited to become President of Harvard College, on condition that he abandon, publicly at least, his views on baptism by total immersion." He agreed and replaced Harvard's "first president, Henry Dunster, who had been invited to leave for having embraced Baptist ideas on baptism." [Source: "Plymouth Colony: Its History & People 1620-1691" by Eugene Audrey Stratton. 1986, Ancestry Publishing.]. I remember reading somewhere that a Baptist woman had her hair shaved off by Puritans, and she fled Massachusetts as a result. [I can't find the source of that now.]