"witness the death of this country, we all once proudly called home."

No; it was the death of a horror, kikz; the a cauterization of a threatening infection, or the removal of a cancer. But it's all - to borrow a Southern phrase - 'gone with the wind,' and rightfully so; long gone before you or I were born. Try living in America today.

Look at it this way: instead of secession, the slaveowners could just as easily have invoked "eminent domain" and demanded payment for their slaves. It would have spared the country in general and the South in particular (peculiar?) the devastation which followed.

But they didn't, did they? No; control of the black race was paramount; even the pre-1865 Southern newspapers said as much. That habit endured even after war and liberation of the slaves. And forget about the supposed "Yankee economic strangulation;" No one mentioned that before the war, either; it was wartime propaganda for European consumption, and one which the South nursed its ego for the century after.

Don't try to lecture about liberty or rights, kikz. If the South was right, the North was all the righter; if the North was wrong, the South was all the wronger.