Many conservatives have a tendency to believe that The Confederate States were in the right on the issue of states’ rights. Part of the current conservative mantra runs, “I support state’s rights, and that makes me sympathetic to the Confederacy. Slavery is bad, but so is a government so big and oppressive that it takes away the rights of the individual states.”
The Southern States were not the bastions of freedom and individual rights that some currently portray them to be. It’s interesting that none of the Southern states allowed residents to vote on secession. A handful of wealthy men, ordering mobs of hooligans to beat up, tar and feather, lynch, and drive many any with Northern tendencies from the South, was able to seize control of the state governments and force legislation that compelled them to secede from the Union.
This high-handed tyranny left the Southern states with a considerable body of people who knew they’d been treated unfairly. That was the underlying flaw in logic that caused the South to lose the war: “How could people be free in any state or country that refused its citizens the right to vote on something as important as secession? Are whites who were denied the vote being treated any better by the Confederacy than the blacks who weren’t allowed to vote, either.?”
As more Southerners were, by the sheer logic programmed within every mind, forced to answer “No.”, the Confederacy lost support within what a minority of elitists wanted to be an independent nation.
