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The “ South” was not at all a democracy. It was ruled entirely by the aristocratic elite in the Deep South. The fact that in the North, people who opposed slavery, even if they were in the minority, were able to exist, drove them nuts. The aristocrats did not tolerate disagreements. And like you, they believed their own BS about King Cotton. It’s a damn shame that 700,00 men from both sides had to die, but that is how history works. It can be very ugly.

This is completely false. The Southern states were as democratic as they had ever been...including the time of the Founding Fathers a couple generations earlier. They were as democratic as the Northern states. The rich have always had outsized political influence. That's true. That was every bit as true in the North as in the South at the time. No, they did not rule over everyone else. They could easily be outvoted since they were only a small minority. Abolitionists could not get more than single digit percentages of the vote in any election anywhere in the North prior to 1863. They were a tiny, despised minority that had almost no influence.