Kearny? I know it well. I processed out of the Newark MEPS, when I went into the Army. I grew up the Hudson Valley, literally outside the gates of West Point. I have a lot of family members who wore Blue as well. My paternal Grandfather was a native Mississippian. As I got older, went South and studied the Constitution, I began to realize that everything I was taught in school, was a lie. I read the letters home from my Northern ancestors, and to a man they went to fight because it would be a “great adventure” and they didn’t want people at home to consider them cowards. There was no mention of saving the Union, freeing the slaves or anything of that nature. Contrast that with the letters home to Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama from my Southern ancestors and they were “defending our homes and our families.”
Slavery would have died a natural death as Industry went further south. Was it worth 700,000 lives and the destruction of Southern cities? The North didn’t need slavery once it became industrialized and there was plenty of cheap labor pouring in to Boston, New York and Philadelphia, from Ireland, Italy and Germany. Abolitionists were considered zealots among the Northern population and the draft riots of 1863, simply illustrated how unpopular the war was.
In the end, the indisputable truth is that if Washington, Jefferson and Adams were right to rebel against a “duly elected” government in London, that was not invested in their interests, so were Davis, Lee, Stephens and Jackson. Yes, the batteries at Charleston fired up Sumter, just like the colonials fired on the redcoats on Lexington Green and Concord Bridge. To believe otherwise, is intellectual dishonesty.