I am wondering based on an overall percentile, what percent of the population in Southern states were really eligible to actually vote in 1860-1861?
The real question should be did the general public cast their vote for secession from the United States of America - or the hand pick political hacks from the South's economic slave empire?
Some relevant cases in point.
They favored peace, reunion, and the defeat of the Confederacy. They began early in the war as a group of Unionists and Quakers in the piedmont regions of North Carolina and Virginia where few slaves were.
Some estimate that by the war's end, as many as 10,000 people belonged to the Red Strings. They were comparably as disruptive to the Southern war effort as the treasonous Copperheads were to the Union.
After the war, they actively opposed the terrorist ex-Confederate group, the Ku Klux Klan.
The War Within the Confederacy: White Unionist of North Carolina
The South Vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War
In retrospect the logical conclusion is the more vested interest in a slave based economy (profits) the demand for a separate slave empire was greater, therefore succession was the despicable seditionist order of the day.
In Southern state districts with negligible slavery, the general population resisted the Confederates, some very forcefully, such as in East Tennessee - and paid a very high price for attempting to remain loyal American citizens.
When today's 'neo-confederates' claim slavery had nothing to do with the origins of the Civil War the claim is nothing but a brazen lie, and they bloody well know it.
Abe Lincoln won the election of 1860 and the slaveocracy responded by triggering wholesale civil war by attacking U.S. military installations and U.S. Navy ships.
