You keep putting this on the Confederates who did not attack for three months until someone sent a fleet of warships with orders to use force to keep the unwanted guests in their home. (and to make sure they continued paying the duties ordered by Washington DC.)
Had that fleet of warships not been sent, they would have had no need to attack at all.
And while we are on the subject, I find it immensely curious that I have only learned of this war fleet in the last few years. I consider it to be quite relevant to the events there, yet I had heard no word of it until relatively recently. I think discussion of it has been actively discouraged by most of the history book writers because it confuses the issue of who started the war.
All most people have ever heard is that the confederates fired on Ft. Sumter. Nobody ever tells them that Lincoln sent a belligerent fleet of warships against them, and this is what triggered it. It's as if they want this little detail covered up, because it's harder to sell the "we were attacked for no apparent reason" claim when you find out about the warships.
Even my friend who first put me on to this line of thinking, never mentioned there was a bunch of warships sent. I doubt he even knows about it.
But getting back to the point, getting "permission" to leave an organization is a form of slavery in and of itself. It means you don't control your own destiny. Others control it for you.
That is a false dichotomy. What you're ignoring is the secessionists refusal to work for their goals within the existing system.
In a democracy consisting of 4 wolves and a sheep, the goal is to have the sheep for dinner. There is no methodology whereby the sheep was going to get relief within the existing system.
Many places in the world today work for independence by mutual consent. Why was that so hard for the secessionists to do?
I'll bite. Tell me your plan for allowing the Southerners to get out of the laws and taxes imposed on them? What concessions would they have had to make to get the independence they wanted?
I will tell you that I believe there never could have been any such plan, because the entire reason Lincoln wanted them to remain under his control is precisely to insure the revenue they produced would continue flowing through New York and into Washington DC.
No plan that didn't keep the money flowing would be accepted. Money was the entire point of suppressing their independence. Read Lincoln's speech about "and to collect the duties and imposts..."
I think you might want to retreat from this thought, because if you go down this road and try to find some plan that would allow the south to leave by mutual consent, you will see the reality of it. Once seen, it cannot be unseen. You will start to notice that everything converges on this point of money.
Then make the money work for you. Modern day protesters in the US and South Africa recognized that pictures of police attacking peaceful protesters would eventually be bad for business.
Obviously, secessionists didn't have the information and experience that 20th century organizers did, but surely they could have forseen that working out a solution that would be acceptable to both sides was the only way to keep the peace. But they didn't want peace. They wanted to lash out with force. So they chose to act unilaterally and ultimately militarily.
If Davis had said that he wouldn't fire the first shot , or better still, if he and his cronies had stayed in Congress to work out a solution acceptable to both sides, there wouldn't have been a war -- or at least not a war started by the secessionists -- but they didn't because they wanted war (or at least were willing to risk war) to get what they wanted.
There you go with the ad hominem stuff again.
You reduce history and the people in it into simplistic cliches: it's all about the money, and if it isn't it's about power and ego. If that's the case, what makes you any different? What makes you any more trustworthy and upright than anyone else? If you spread cynicism beyond its natural limits, don't be surprised if cynicism comes back to get at you.
My primary concern at that time was the possibility of being incinerated by Soviet Nuclear ICBMs (for Obvious reasons growing up next to a US Military base)
Missile bases are in places where not many people live, right? The military and the government don't want large civilian populations to be destroyed by enemies attacking our nuclear weapons. So wherever you lived wasn't likely to be a major commercial or financial or industrial or educational or cultural or media or political center.
But that's okay. Different parts of the country play different roles and develop attitudes based on the roles they play. If by some chance your hometown became an economic and cultural center, you'd either have all the "New York City" faults that you attack, or you'd still be complaining about the horrible sophisticates in Minot or Cheyenne or Great Falls and how they look down on the rest of the country.
My point is: if you have a rich and successful country, you will have some places richer than others and they'll have attitudes that are different from those that prevail in other parts of the country. Just like you'll have some people who are much richer than other people. But that's okay. It's something the country can life with and something we can't avoid if we have an economy that is rich enough and complicated enough.