I know all about quotes from Lincoln, I know the North didn’t fight to free slaves either…I’m not too interested in so much in what the North did/didn’t do

The thing that I don’t see enough of is so few are willing to come to grips with the fact that the South was seceding from the Northern states because of the threat to their “institutions” (slavery) and that being equalized with the Negro was abhorrent to their mind set of the time.

I look at what the leaders in the South were saying to their folk in 1861…

“If the policy of the Republicans is carried out, according to the program indicated by the leaders of the party, and the South submits, degradation and ruin must overwhelm alike all classes of citizens in the Southern States. The slave-holder and non-slave-holder must ultimately share the same fate-- all be degraded to a position of equality with free negroes, stand side by side with them at the polls, and fraternize in all the social relations of life; or else there will be an eternal war of races, desolating the land with blood, and utterly wasting and destroying all the resources of the country.
Who can look upon such a picture without a shudder? What Southern man, be he slave-holder or non-slave-holder, can without indignation and horror contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and daughters, in the not distant future, associating with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality, and the white man stripped, by the Heaven-daring hand of fanaticism of that title to superiority over the black race which God himself has bestowed? In the Northern States, where free negroes are so few as to form no appreciable part of the community, in spite of all the legislation for their protection, they still remain a degraded caste, excluded by the ban of society from social association with all but the lowest and most degraded of the white race. But in the South, where in many places the African race largely predominates, and, as a consequence, the two races would be continually pressing together, amalgamation, or the extermination of the one or the other, would be inevitable. Can Southern men submit to such degradation and ruin? God forbid that they should.”
S.F. HALE, Commissioner from the State of Alabama, to B. McGoffin, Governor of Kentucky, December 27, 1860.

The secession agitators worked real hard to stir up folk about all the fearful things that were going to happen to them if the Lincoln Government had their way. Fears were played upon, newpapers told stories of conspiracies of imagined uprisings, a good number of folk (how many we will never know) were hung or murdered because someone believed rumors they were sent to stir up the slaves, and burned whole communities here in Texas, with no shred of justifiable evidence.
Some talk of how badly Lincoln treaded all over the rights of folk… Well I know of cases where no less was done to citizens down South, by their own people.

Instead of staying and fighting for their rights thru a system that their fore-Fathers set up with the Constitution, and working at consolidating their votes in the House and Senate, they decided to split away from the other States.

Problem is that the South was nowhere prepared to fight an inevitable war with a much more organized country with a centralized Government that had the means to fight a long term war to bring the country back together.

Many a Southern soldier left at the end to pick up the pieces of the country asked: “What does it all amount to?”

We are still asking those questions today. I just don’t believe in trying to show all the bad things about the North, so the South somehow looks better. The South wasn’t so pure at heart and justified in all it did either.
Human nature is not bound by North & South borders, real or imagined. It can be good, and evil no matter where it is.

Kevin Dally