[cuban leaf]

—Laying the responsibility for how things are now on the Civil War or Abraham Lincoln seems a little oversimplified. Maybe you should consider those other changes as well.—

I consider it the beginning, and a strong one it was.

[central_va]

I consider it the beginning, and a strong one it was.

Abe didn't execute the republic, but he built the scaffold.

[x]

A lot of people nowadays simply project their own concerns today back on the past, and make every past conflict revolve around what interests them now.

For decades, Southern Democrats weren't so worried about big government so long as it let them have their way locally in racial matters. Who's to say the Confederacy would have been any different?

One big lesson in politics: people oppose a faraway government because it isn't "theirs." They see every act of the government as a usurpation. When people get a government that is "their own," they tolerate and even demand the same kinds of things they objected to before.