[PaulS]

Originally Posted by detbuch

They were not traitors. Perhaps you couldn't answer if states are necessary because you don't understand why they were not traitors.

At the time, states had a lot more of their sovereignty intact than they do now. Their states had seceded from the union. They were patriots of the states they fought for, not traitors.

I understand Lincoln's argument that states could not secede without approval of the other states with whom they had a legal compact. But it wasn't clear then, nor totally so now, that the southern states did not have the right to secede. It certainly would be unfair to ask the average southerner what the complicated legal arguments were.

They fought with the same fidelity for their country as did the Union soldiers. Their sovereign states were their primary country, and the Confederacy was the new union to which their states belonged.

Lincoln understood that and saw no need to compound unnecessary animosities and to recognize the tragedy of brothers, literal or national, who were called to so brutally slaughter each other. Lincoln was not at all happy about having to kill so much of the flowering manhood of the South. He would have been repulsed by your point of view.

Lighten up.
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