What a minor sect does or believes does not alter the original statement. Since you cannot say the same thing about immeasurably larger mainstream baptists in the south, you are demonstrating the rule by its exception.
but the Puritans who became unitarians did so because they rejected the orthodoxy of their ancestors.
They maintained the orthodoxy of methods and, most of all, the puritan culture. You are correct only in that they drifted away from biblical literalism, which was a natural and inevitable evolution of the flawed theological doctrines that puritanism was originally built upon.
You are also forgetting something else. The South is the home of a unitarianism of its own, the so-called "oneness Pentecostals" who reject the "tr*inity" and insist that Heaven was vacant for 33 years.
You are confusing small-U unitarian concepts of divine being with Unitarianism proper. The formal Unitarian (or now Unitarian-Universalist) church is the subject of my posts when I state that Unitarianism evolved directly and theologically from the Puritans.
These people are the "holy rollers" and "snake handlers" of the Appalachian highlands, which, need I remind you, adhered to the Union during the Civil War.
Though there were definately pockets of it including one very large one in eastern tennessee, appalachian unionism is frequently overstated and in many areas is nothing more than myth.
Kentucky never seceded
Kentucky had sizable secessionists elements. It's failure to secede had immeasurably more to do with the fact that it was a border state than with any appalachian element. Geographically Kentucky found itself in the same situation as Missouri and Maryland. Politically, it found itself under the heavy arm of the union government early on in the war explicitly to prevent it from seceding.
West Virginia seceded from Confederate Virginia and rejoined the Union
Partially incorrect. West Virginia was the product of a strong though geographically isolated pocket of unionists in the extreme northwestern counties of old Virginia near the Ohio River and centered around Wheeling. Those counties had always been geographically isolated from the rest of Virginia and had the curious distinction of being the only part of the Old South proper to extend north of the Mason Dixon line. They were culturally and politically closer to Pennsylvania and Ohio than to Virginia, which is why they opposed Virginia's secession from the get go. Appalachia had very little to do with it. The trick of the West Virginia secession is found in the fact that when those northwestern Wheeling-area counties split away from Virginia they also claimed about 30 counties to their south as their own with virtually no consent from those counties or their residents. In fact, at least half of the southern West Virginia counties voted in favor of secession in the 1861 referendum (the actual number is probably even more than that because the countywide referendum records from 5-10 additional rural counties in that region have been lost). Many had absolutely no representative in the Wheeling Conventions that voted to split. Others had "representatives" who were nothing more than SELF APPOINTED ne'er-do-wells who showed up, claimed to represent one or more of these southern counties, and were seated by the overzealous unionists in Wheeling. Even the vote to split was suspect: Wheeling held a "referendum" on the matter that was in reality one of those Saddam Hussein style "elections" where 99% of the vote was "yes" and where soldiers at the "polls" in the south kept anybody who would've voted no away.
East Tennessee might have done the same had it not been for the presence of a Confederate army, and western North Carolina and northern Georgia were also home to Union sentiment.
Of those regions, the only sizable one was eastern Tennessee and that can be measured by the number of troops east Tenn. provided to the yankees (about 30,000). Appalachian North Carolina, by contrast, provided only 3,000 yankee troops. Georgia's records are incomplete but it is estimated that the entire state provided less than 500 troops to the yankees based upon the known casualty figures, which state only 15 Georgians died or were wounded on the yankee side.
There is nothing conservative about populism.
Sure there is. You are again confusing capital-P Populism of the late 19th century - a left wing political movement - with the lowercase-p concept of populism, meaning little more than that which draws support to its message by appeal to the people or the masses. One can accordingly be religiously populist and politically conservative without any contradiction.
As for agrarianism, for most of its history the entire United States was an agrarian society. The Midwest, though in lifestyle closer to the South, certainly joined New England in the War.
That they did, though more so for economic rather than ideological reasons. The midwest was becoming a railroad mecca at the time and railroads were intimately connected to the north's economic agenda. You will also note that the midwest was the hotbed of the copperhead movement during the war, which sought to make peace with the south.
Until relatively recently, New England always had its share of yeoman farmers.
Which have tended to till small, isolated, and climate-restrained farm plots. The Northeast has always trended towards the cities, which for most of its history have grown to overshadow the farms. It was the first region of the nation to build big urban centers, especially so after the New England culture extended southwest to encompass New York City.
And for most of the "19th" and "20"th Centuries New England was very conservative.
Not in the political sense. The Puritan culture has always tilted toward revolutionary actions (that is to say they constantly agitate to supplant existing social orders with a new one of their own making and control). It's history is in fact dominated by this tendency and appears both in Britain and New England, sometimes for the better but more often for the worse. The English Civil War, the American Revolution, the 1803 Canadian schemes, the War of 1812 Hartford Convention, the New England abolitionist movement, and the American Civil War are all prime examples where New Englanders have agitated in a revolutionary direction.
Do you not remember that in 1936 it was only Maine and Vermont, not the South, that voted against FDR? Huh? Do yuh?
Yeah, and I also remember that the 1936 election was not an ideological turning point by any means or measure. The choice was socialist FDR against the "me too" Republicans who at best advocated a Hooveresque Reconstruction Finance Corporation toned down alternative to Roosevelt's interventionist marxism. Maine and Vermont went Republican in that year out of historical party loyalties rather than any overriding ideological consideration. Contrast that with a true ideological election such as 1964 - every single state in the nation voted for LBJ in a landslide save five states, every single one of them a former state or territory of the CSA.
And of course the income tax (now the bane of "populists") began as a populist measure aimed against "money grubbing yankees" and was supported by the South and opposed by the Northeast.
Actually the income tax began in the civil war, at which point the entire congress was from the north save two west coast states and a couple rural ones.
And of course there is the uncomfortable fact that "radical" New England and its "unitarian" clergymen were the ones who opposed revolutionary France and saw Jacobins behind every bush in the "1790's" while the "conservative" South and its aristocrats (such as Thomas Jefferson) supported the Jacobins.
If you have to turn to sectional preference on foreign affairs taking place an ocean away at a time when the Americans could not have practically or logistically intervened to any substantial degree in either direction to make your case, you truly are grasping at straws.
When you condemn "Puritan theology" what are you condemning? Protestantism? Radical rather than classical Protestantism? Creationism? The rejection of the church calendar and traditions? Puritanism got its name from its desire to "purify" the Church of England from non-Biblical accretions (not from any sexual hang-ups as is generally assumed). If calendars, feasts, and rituals are so important, there will always be those who will prefer the Biblical (ie, Jewish) ones and insist that if these have been abolished (G-d forbid!) that no new ones derived largely from paganism have ever been authorized. If you regard Biblical sentimentalism or "Bibliolatry" as the basic Puritan heresy then you are indeed a Cavalier and there is no need in continuing our dialogue.
I note that you list the American Revolution among New England's radical movements (though Virginia was also a large contributor to the movement). It is unusual to find an American conservative who will criticize the American Revolution as the relativistic element of rightism demands that the local national origin/myth/heroes/governmental traditions be sanctified (with the Revolution and Constution being the American equivalents of "throne and altar" elsewhere). I myself question the American Revolution, as did apparently the Federalists. It was the Federalists of the North who afterwards backtracked and wanted a government very much like that of Great Britain from which they had rebelled. Perhaps they realized that they had been manipulated by sinister elements? It was Jefferson and the Southern aristocrats who wanted a radical break with the past in the form of a small coastal agrarian Republic (as even Pat Buchanan has pointed out). The most prominent of the Federalists was not a New Englander but Alexander Hamilton of New York. After the war he defended many accused tories as a lawyer and he is accused of trying to impose a British-style monarchy on the new Union. Is this not conservatism? He is the one who wanted to continue with pretty much what they had always known.
I find it strange that you would indict the Essex Junto and Hartford Convention. I thought pro-Confederates liked to invoke them to prove that the South is not the only place that believed in the right to secede. For me, it merely proves that ideology is often merely self-interest rationalized, which explains why "our" secession is good while "theirs" is bad.
Do you really believe that John Adams, John Quincy Adams (Sam Adams was a Jeffersonian), Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924), and Calvin Coolidge were radicals? Really??? And that the radical Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democrats were "conservatives?" And do you really believe that the in the culture war between William McKinley and his old moneyed Northeast supporters and Bryan (my hero at Dayton) that the former were the radicals and the latter the conservatives?
There were three attempts to impose an income tax on the country. The first was during the Civil War (which was temporary) and the second was during the 1880's/90's (which was passed but ruled unconstitutional). The third attempt was spearheaded by Southern and Western populists against the same Northeastern financial establishment that today's Right accuses of being "secretly behind Communism."
Whatever you may say, Southern Unionism was as real as Northern Copperheadism. All four branches of my family were Southern Unionists. East Tennessee is Republican to this day and often called the "Union" part of the State (and there were Union/Republican outposts even in the Middle and West). Unless you are suggesting that my entire family history is a myth (hard to maintain when you consider that we have never had any Democrats among us) then however much you may explain away West Virginia, you cannot deny Southern Unionism. And btw, the notoriously "liberal" New York City was a hotbed of Copperheads.
It is distressing to me that while you chose to respond in great detail to some parts of my previous posts you have chosen to completely ignore others (my questions about John Brown's fundamentalist Calvinism, Coolidge, H. L. Mencken, etc.). And I am sorry that you think Southern planter support of the Jacobin Revolution in France at a time when the cooler heads of the Northeast prevailed (and conducted America's first "red scare") is so unimportant that you feel you can dismiss it with a sniff. History cannot be changed, and the support of Jacobinism by the "aristocratic Southern democrats" is an historical fact that cannot be made to go away by dismissing it.
You actually don't like Primitive Baptists, do you? I can imagine what you must think of Bob Jones University and its affinity for Protestant Unionism in Ulster. (Yeah, I know, Jones isn't "Primitive" . . . but it's sure a lot closer to Cromwell than it is to the Stewarts! Are they perhaps "yankees who don't know it???")