DiogenesLamp: "Clearly it is informed people on a blog site 150 years later.
Alexander Stephens was a politician, and so what he says isn't necessarily the truth."
But what DiogenesLamp posts here is never the truth, indeed, you can usually find the truth just by taking the opposite side of DiogenesLamp's posts.
Alexander Stephens was an important Confederate political figure in 1861, selected as Vice President, he expressed Reasons for Secession in terms average citizens of those states could understand & relate to.
Now DiogenesLamp wants us to fantasize with him that those were not the "real reasons", that really, Stephens and other Confederate leaders hid their "real reasons" which had to do more with "Northeastern power brokers" and "money flows from Europe".
But no Confederate leader ever expressed themselves that way, and so we have to tell DiogenesLamp, as politely as possible under the circumstances to, ahem, "go jump in a lake".
DiogenesLamp: "I think they wanted Independence. Virginia certainly didn't go to war over slavery, and I dare say none of the other states contributed as much to the cause as did the Virginians."
Virginia was the first state for whom their declaration of secession was simultaneously effectively a declaration of war on the United States.
The war did not start over slavery, but over Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for 75,000 troops to suppress rebellion.
But slavery was behind secession and abolition soon enough became the Union's rallying cry.
- "...any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks, and that the whole course of the Yankee government has not only been directed to the abolition of slavery, but even to a stirring up of servile insurrections, is either a fool or a liar."
-- "The Vidette" published by CSA Gen. John M Hunt, November 1862.