Washington fought for Independence from an oppressive and remote regime... I’m trying to distiguish... Nope, can’t.
::Sigh:: You know, it's late and I really don't have time for all this. Our friend x has done a very good job of punching your arguments full of holes and I commend him for it.
I am myself a Southerner, from the Upper South, and the descendant of Southern Unionists. There were lots of Southern Unionists, just as there were lots of Northern Copperheads. The whole notion that everyone on the North was on one side and everyone on the South on the other is nonsense, and I sincerely hope you know better. As the descendant of Southern Unionists forgive me if I get a bit tired of the constant deification of Jefferson Davis and labeling of Abraham Lincoln as a Communist (and the Republican party as the creation of Communists). It's especially rankling when the lovers of localism and decentralism turn right around and idolize Francisco Franco, Antonio Salazar, George Papadopoulos, Rafael Trujillo, and Chiang Kai-shek--men who ruled highly centralized regimes and who would never have allowed any locality to secede from their regimes.
At any rate (and I do hope you're still reading since I'm going to raise some important points you've utterly misrepresented), you totally ignore the fact that the ideological aggression leading to the Civil War came primarily from the pro-slavery side. First was the Compromise of 1850 which included a fugitive slave law, forcing citizens of free states to cooperate with something they believed was morally wrong (sound familiar?). Then came the Kansas-Nebraska Act which repealed the Missouri Compromise, which up to that point had been considered sacrosanct. Then came the Dred Scott decision. It was obvious to all that what was at the time called "the slave power" had every intention of forcing slavery into every single state and territory of the United States whether the people in those states and territories wanted it or not. Of course, this doesn't fit the stereotype of the mean old Yankee Republicans picking on virtuous slave owners for absolutely no reason whatsoever, does it?
Then was the fact that any protest against the spread of slavery was being shouted down (the caning of Charles Sumner being merely one example). Yes, there were radical abolitionists but they didn't bring the conflict on all by themselves.
Are you even remotely interested in the plain facts of history, or is your determination to identify the defeat of the Confederacy with The Fall Of Man so strong that you don't care about the facts at all?
Finally, while Washington indeed rebelled against a tyrannical government, the fact is that just a few years later he presided over the drafting of a federal Constitution (something that exceeded the authority of the convention and done in absolute secrecy) that created a government in many was just as big as the British one against which he had rebelled. This all culminated in the Alien and Sedition Laws in the John Adams administration (and Adams had been Washington's VP) which made it illegal to criticize the federal government and its officials--ironic, considering that Adams had been one of the fiery radicals of the Revolution a mere two decades earlier.
The Founding Fathers basically fell into two camps. Some (the Anti-Federalists, later Jeffersonian Republicans) believed in a strict construction of the Constitution and states' rights (some held that the United States was not a nation at all but a "compact" among nations). The other was the Federalists--men like Washington, Hamilton, John Adams, John Jay, etc., who believed in federal supremacy, implied powers, and a national bank (something Washington personally signed into law). Anyone who makes the claim that one of these two schools of thought is the "official" One True Interpretation of the Constitution is either an ignoramus or a liar.
In the name of my brave Southern Unionist ancestors, I pardon you for your rebellion.