JCBreckenridge: "Heh, you haven’t even seen what they did during reconstruction.
Heck, we still have laws that say the south are second-class citizens... "
Do you not comprehend that Northern attitudes towards the South changed in the five years between 1860 and 1865?
Which part of that change did you somehow miss?
previously, BJK referring to 1860: “What most Northerners wanted was to prevent slavery from becoming legal in their own states and in western territories.”
JCBreckenridge: "Then why did they invade the South?"
The Union did not invade until after Deep South states declared secession, then provoked, started and formally declared war on the United States.
Soon Confederate forces invaded Union states & territories of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma, New Mexico, then Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana & Kansas.
And they didn't stop there -- Confederates eventually operated in California, Colorado, Vermont and even New York.
Bottom line: Confederates were always as aggressive towards the Union as they physically could be.
So a Confederate Civil War victory meant inevitable destruction of whatever was left of the United States Union.
“Do you not comprehend that Northern attitudes towards the South changed in the five years between 1860 and 1865?”
I contend that there were folks who wanted the outright destruction of the South and the slave power even back in the 1820s, and that there was significant opposition to the South and to Jackson back then.
From, much the same quarters as we later saw in the 60s. See, you don’t understand this conflict which is why you think it suddenly burst out in 1860 out of nowhere. No, no it didn’t. The conflict between the states and the federal government goes back a long time.
We see in the war of 1812 - that the North, when it suited her interests was willing to defy the federal government and seek secession.
Again, it had nothing to do with slavery and everything to do with the same dispute that consumed Jackson and Calhoun. The same arguments advanced by Ohio in their dispute with the Bank of the US were advanced later by Calhoun and then in the Civil War.
“The Union did not invade until after Deep South states declared secession”
So the Union invaded. Thank you. Rather than permit the South to leave the same way they came (the same argument advanced by New England), the almighty federal government said no.
At a cost of half a million Americans. Was it worth it?