“Sorry pal, but the South did not secede because Lincoln wanted to send blacks back to Africa.”
You keep looking at what I say bass ackwards. I never said they did. The north thought they could abolish slavery, alright. But Abe was still thinking “yeah, abolish it by shipping them out.” He didn’t give up on his idea until after a couple of failed attempts, and had to cave in 1863.
The South seceded because they were thinking that State’s Rights were just that ... and they felt a lot like I do right now .. WTF? Does the government really think they can tell me how to live? That my pocket is there for them to be picked? That whether it is right to support everyone they want me to support or not is not the point, but that God gave me freedom to choose, not them? That I have no say in commerce, lifestyle or economy (however wrong it might be and there was PLENTY of Southerners who made that admission) and to just STFU and change it their pace and not at the pace I think will work best for me and my state?
The South did NOT create slavery, but the whole economy (including the money made in the north) stemmed from it to some extent. That can simply not be denied. The South did NOT believe that the time was right to end it. The North did.
That’s when the South went berserk and sent all of their troops north to burn and kill everything that moved. Or is it the other way around?
The Confederate regime was too busy looting and murdering Southern citizens to get started on the North.
First point: some people tend to conflate the barbarities of, say, a World War Two with the Civil War -- and there is no real comparison.
By any standard of more modern warfare, both sides in the Civil War were absolute gentlemen, disciplined and well behaved, usually beyond reproach.
And that was no accident, they were ordered to be so by their commanders. So the numbers of civilians murdered or raped was minuscule compared to, say, the tens of millions who died in the Second World War.
Yes, Civil War armies often lived off the land -- especially Southern armies, which could not afford bring their own supplies. By contrast, Northern armies were usually more self sufficient.
Of course I'm not saying there was no harm done to civilians, only that relatively speaking, it was quite small.
Second point: the South did indeed send their armies into Union states and territories -- whenever they could -- and those included Maryland, Pennsylvania, Western Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma and New Mexico among others.
Of course, if you only look at the last year of the Civil War, it seems like a total "War of Northern Aggression" against the South.
But if you study the first year, you'll see it was entirely a "War of Southern Aggression" against the North.