“Since we’re into Southerners vs Northerners, we might want to ask again -— was the civil war between the American North and South about slavery as the standard talking heads want us to believe, or was it about state rights and the right to self-determination?”
You are right.
I was born in Memphis, and my parents had been from Atlanta.
I consider myself a true southerner.
As with many, however, my ancestors arrived in the north
from Scotland and Ireland.
My only notable ancestor was Uncle Sam, a great great great uncle.
He became famous when he was selling pork to the US army
in the war of 1812.
Some of his family migrated south into Georgia.
My mother’s Irish family settled in Kentucky.
Slavery was just a side note to the reason for the civil war.
Quote from the famous Baltimore Journalist, H.L. Mencken regarding the Gettysburg Address:
“But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination— ‘that government of the people, by the people, for the people,’ should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue.
“The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, i.e., of the people of the States? The Confederates went into battle free; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision and veto of the rest of the country—and for nearly twenty years that veto was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely more liberty, in the political sense, than so many convicts in the penitentiary.”
— Journalist H.L. Mencken, From “Five Men at Random,” “Prejudices: Third Series,” 1922, pp. 171-76: First printed, in part, in the “Smart Set,” May, 1920, p. 141
Not according to the States that seceded it wasn't.
That was the reason why they attempted to break up the Union, they didn't like the results of an election.
as one southerner said to another, "if we knew back then what we know now, we'd have picked our own cotton."