LOL! If credibility is based on a short quote from a biased newspaper, then you've got it in spades. Here in the real world, however.....
I note in passing that the first shot of the war was fired by Edmund Ruffin. Ruffin's desire to push the secessionist movement towards a confrontation with the North brought him to Charleston during the Sumter crisis. He intended to take his stand with the Confederacy, and he hoped events would drive his native state, Virginia , out of the Union. His ardent southern nationalism made him a hero of southern radicals. He was invited to attend three secession conventions, and given the honor of firing one of the first batteries against Fort Sumter.
A rather telling little passage, which demonstrates that at least some of the influential southerners were not so peaceful and reasonable as the ones who inhabit the imaginations of the pro-Confederates hereabout.
As the war drew to a close, Ruffin committed suicide His last words were: "I here declare my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule -- to all political, social and business connection with the Yankees and to the Yankee race. Would that I could impress these sentiments, in their full force, on every living Southerner and bequeath them to every one yet to be born! May such sentiments be held universally in the outraged and down-trodden South, though in silence and stillness, until the now far-distant day shall arrive for just retribution for Yankee usurpation, oppression and atrocious outrages, and for deliverance and vengeance for the now ruined, subjugated and enslaved Southern States!
...And now with my latest writing and utterance, and with what will be near my latest breath, I here repeat and would willingly proclaim my unmitigated hatred to yankee rule--to all political, social and business connections with Yankees, and the perfidious, malignant and vile Yankee race."