Their slaves weren't men or people so of course they couldn't govern themselves, right? - sarc.
Also: consider that the South were actually the instigators of the war. The South had several recourses they had not explored. They wanted war, precisely because they expected that given self-determination, even among only whites, their system of intolerable repression could not withstand scrutiny. Lincoln had promised non-interference in the slavery question, but the South seceded before he was even inaugurated, because they understood that it was the North which fought for self-governance.
The South fought to prevent the Western Territories from being incorporated as Free States, regardless of the will of the people in the Western Territories, for fear that unless they entered the union under the thumb of a slave-holding aristocracy, they would not tolerate slave-holding within their borders.
The South fought to prevent the Northern states from self-determination, but instead sought to impose their laws on the North through the Dred Scott case, the Fugitive Slave Act, and other abominations to Democracy.
Absurdly, the South had managed to claim that their votes represented the votes of the black slaves within them.
The South turned to the Ku Klux Klan to act as the Terrorist wing of the Democratic Party, precisely because they knew that without terror, they could never remain in power, once blacks were permitted to vote.
“Their slaves weren’t men or people so of course they couldn’t govern themselves, right?”
“Their” slaves were considered no differently than the slaves in the north...and those that were in the South as states of the Union. Your comment is devoid of logic and has no relevance.
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“it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.”
Their slaves weren’t men or people so of course they couldn’t govern themselves, right? - sarc.”
Nether were the imperialist northerns waging war to liberate the enslaved in all the rest of the world.
The very same imperialist who repeatedly professed that the matter of slavery was not the reason they were waging war on the South. Instead theses imperialist explicitly and repeatedly proclaimed that the war was to force an a once voluntary (but now unwanted) “union” upon a once free self-determining people.
They even went so far as to proclaim that the United States would cease to exist if secession were allowed. As if every union must be maintained by the sword rather then the free will and mutual benefit of its members.
Quite frankly what theses imperialist were imposing was just anther form of slavery, slavery thou subjugation.
The northern copperheads were right to hate the tyrant Lincoln just as Booth should be celebrated not condemned for what he did to that tyrant.
The fall of The American Republic bares a great deal of similarity to the fall of the Roman republic into the roman empire.
In both cases the Republic fell in a bloody “Civil war”
In both cases the Tyrant that ultimately destroyed the republic was slain by the last patriots defenders in a vane attempt to advert the great evil he had brought upon them and their republic.
In both cases the assignation was too late in the process and the oligarchy had already been formed to supported and really sustain that dictatorship remained to appoint a new “head”.
In both cases the population was left oblivious to what really happened and allowed the illusion that their republic still exited for a great many years, and forestall their rebellion until too few of them remembered and valued liberty to ever pose a serous threat to the dictator/oligarch.
Interestingly enough in both cases the patriot assassin of the dictator were condemned for their acts of opposition of the supreme ruler.
The truth is our Federal republic fell the day the Federal Government decided it had to force the free States back into the union against the will of their people.
The day the same Federal government acquired the military power to do that, the oligarchy was formed, and the empire became self-sustaining.
John Wilkes Booth like the Roman patriots Gaius Cassius Longinus and Marcus Junius Brutus was indeed an American patriot, who tried in vain to save our republic.
Although the victor write the history books the truth as illuminated by the light of reason and the persistence presence of evidence, reveals the truth of what really happened just as it illuminates the morality and virtue(or lack there of) of what they did.
The myth about Lincoln as a hero by all rights aut to be acknowledged as what it is, an imperial fabrication of a tyrant and his accomplices to white wash the horrible evils they done.