This.
Just as liberals today are offended by memorials to southerners Lee, Jackson, Davis and others, northerners in the mid-1800s were offended by the limited constitutional government created by Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Mason - all southerners.
Southerners had an agrarian culture that competed with northern love-of-money culture. Then, as now, northerners looked down on southerners. And northerners were jealous of southern successes.
Initially in the young united States of America, all 13 states were slave states. Time passed and northern accountants discovered slavery was not a good economic business model for industry but that it seemed to work for their economic and political rivals in the South. Ten seconds later Puritans in the North announced slavery was morally wrong.
So, northerners decided to destroy their political and economic rivals in the South and overthrow the pro-slavery U.S. Constitution. And war came.
That's a pointless and historically illiterate parallel. Parties oppose each other and aren't crazy about the icons of the other side, but no Northerner was "offended" by anything about George Washington. Their fathers and grandfathers had fought in Washington's army for heaven's sake. He was the father of the country.
Some Northerners didn't love Jefferson. Some Southerners couldn't stand Hamilton or the Adamses, but I don't see that there was anything resembling today's conflicts over monuments. And the conflict over the size of the federal government was piddling by today's standards.
I don't even think you're right about the present day. Some Northerners (and some Southerners) may be "offended" by Confederate flags, but I don't think many Northerners are actually "offended" by monuments to Lee or Jackson. They aren't our thing. You have to figure out if they are yours or not.
Southerners had an agrarian culture that competed with northern love-of-money culture. Then, as now, northerners looked down on southerners. And northerners were jealous of southern successes.
I could just as well say that Northerners had a freedom culture that competed with Southern slaveowning culture, and that Southerners looked down on Northerners and feared Northern successes.
Time passed and northern accountants discovered slavery was not a good economic business model for industry but that it seemed to work for their economic and political rivals in the South. Ten seconds later Puritans in the North announced slavery was morally wrong.
We had a revolution in the name of freedom. Some people drew the obvious lesson about slavery from that. And some people didn't.
So, northerners decided to destroy their political and economic rivals in the South and overthrow the pro-slavery U.S. Constitution. And war came.
Nice fairy tale. Crawl back under your rock.
Unfortunately true. Today with slavery long gone and Jim Crow equally defunct yankees still make it clear they detest Southerners. a society organized around capital expansion and consumerism really cannot understand one in which place and family are more important. (Not all Southerners to be sure. My father's family had many examples of those for whom consumerism and mammon worship came first. He was not that way but could not understand why I disliked his sister's family as I did. To him they were kin first. He had no idea how that thought he was a stupid rube. One cousin would let it slip in mocking my father behind his back. ) The basic problem in debating the issue is agrarianism cannot be reduced to clever written documents. It has to be lived to feel it and understand it in a way that can not be articulated but felt in ones being. Pragmatic materialist will never understand this or even just agree that there are differences that can't be compromised away.