[central_va]

My CSA Army veteran great grandads were (respectively) South Carolinian and Tennessean first—Their great grandson is an American first.

You could learn a lot from your great grandads. States rights died at Appomattox, and with it the republic. Now we live in a cartoon constitutional dictatorship, one the original founders would make cringe and hang their heads in shame.

PS: The south would not collapse without slavery. After the war the North tried to destroy the South, but most somehow barely survived reconstruction despite the freedman bureau's best efforts..

[Happy Rain]

Whether the South would have collapsed without slavery is not the issue-the South BELIEVED it would at the time and thus acted in their best interest at the time.

Succession was possibly the greatest and most unfortunate example of, “it seemed like a good idea at the time” in American history.

[southernsunshine]

After the war the North tried to destroy the South, but most somehow barely survived reconstruction despite the freedman bureau's best efforts..

Speaking of Reconstruction, here's a good one:

Historians who are well aware of the corruption that followed the war . . . seem to imply that it mysteriously appeared after Lincoln's death, and somehow miss the obvious conclusion that it was implicit in the goals of the Lincoln war party. This is to abandon fact and reason for the mysticism of Union and emancipation, a pseudo-religious appeal inappropriate to the discourse of free men.

"War, Reconstruction, and the End of the Old Republic by Clyde N. Wilson in

The Costs of War: America's Pyrrhic Victories ed. John V. Denison, 2nd ed. p.160