[x]

Excellent points. You're thinking of the secessionists as rational and responsible political actors who could have chosen a wise and prudent course, though. A calmer, more thoughtful approach might well have worked, but I suspect the secessionists were more driven by emotion. They did as they pleased and expected other Americans to go along with their wishes. For those others, the anarchic consequences of the schism and the bellicose actions of the rebels called for a response. When you push things to the breaking point out of uncontrollable emotion, as the Confederates did, others will similarly react out of apprehension or distress to preserve order.

Defenders of the Confederacy look back through a haze of resentment, grievance, and victimhood and ask why unionists didn't simply accept the secessionists' demands. But of course, the view of the Confederates as defenseless victims is a product of what happened later in history. Rebel demands, and the army backing them up, appeared very threatening to those who didn't support them.

[Grand Old Partisan]

Yes, southern politicans had been the bullies over the North for decades prior to the Civil War. That the rebels were somehow victims is ridiculous.

[quadrant]

If I, as a Southerner, have anger toward anyone, it is toward the leaders of the South who were so foolish as to begin a war they could not win. They abdicated their responsibilities to the people whom they governed.

Personally, I think the North was foolish not to let the South leave (after all, who wants union with a perpetually discontented region given to threats of rebellion?) but that complete dissolution of the Union was unpalatable to the North was understandable, given the sacrifices that had been made during the Revolutionary War, sacrifices which were after less than a century still vivid in the public imagination.

Southerners who are angry with the treatment the South recieved after the Civil War should read history. The South was treated far better than almost all in history who followed similar courses. The confiscation of property after war is commonplace, witness the confiscation of estates owned by the supporters of the House of York after the Wars of the Roses in England or the loss of property by Japanese landowners after World War II.