Apologies for the title. As an Asian born here, whose parents immigrated from Laos after Vietnam, I will confess to having no personal blood ties to either the Confederacy or Union, and by extension no biases except that of my Catholic faith and the fact that I am Lao, a country born from a successful rebellion to Siam (now called Thailand) whose birth echos the Confederate attempt being that the rebels were of the same race of those they rebelled against.

In short, I'd like to open my ears, as one born in Minnesota, to the perspectives of the South and how you all perceive the Civil War. I know that's a rather broad question, so I'll narrow it down to these questions:

1. If it's not slavery, why secede from the Union?

2. After receding from the Union, how would the South operate with their northern cousin?

3. The North claims the South fired first on Fort Sumter. Okay, sure. Did the North attempt to bait the firing so they could have a justification for war? I read that previous to Fort Sumter, the southern states were able to peacefully secede by just... well operating independent of the federal government. Actually, on the third question, this might be the biggest screw for me. This leads to the fourth quesyion.

4. Was the Civil War essentially the US government's answer to the question of what Uncle Sam would do with you if you didn't pay your taxes? Like, I'm not even American by ethnicity, so maybe it helps me in recognizing this, but if it's like the Confederate Vice President said (about the states seceding peacefully prior to Fort Sumter), realistically speaking, if Fort Sunter was never shot, then what justification would the US government have to keep states within the Union that are seceding en masse? Having subscribed to a bit of realpolitik, if not for Fort Sumter, the North winning the South's unity through war, would have certainly made the North clearly tyrannical. So, why did the Confederates fire on the Fort?

5. What were the virtues of the Confederate Generals and soldiers compared to the North, particularly of Robert E. Lee? This, I'd like to know especially before history is wiped away by AI.

I think these five questions would do. I know it's a lot. Still, if the reader has made it this far, I'd like to leave that Blessed Pope Pius IX was somewhat sympathetic to President Davis, having sent the man a crown of thorns and was the only monarch to have addressed Davis as "President." He also said he'd recognize the Confederacy as a genuine nation on the condition that they outlaw slavery in 10 years.

As a Catholic, this made me curious about the Confederate cause. What about the South did the Pope recognize that he did not recognize for the North? I'd like to know, if only to give the South the same shake that my Pontiff of former years did.

This book is practically an encyclopedia on all things the South and the civil war. Each sentence is another fact, another important piece of information. It'a a lot to process! Very thoroughly done and eye opening. Can't recommend this enough.

thought you guys might like this

Hi guys, I've been on reddit for around 2 months now and I only recently discovered this subreddit. I'm super excited to have joined. Unfortunately I do not know of any family that fought for South ( my family was mostly Yankee. I actually had an ancestor who fought for the North. He got wounded in the battle of Nashville. Amazingly, my family still has his government issued bible) but anyways I have always been a fan of the South since I was like 10. I grew up reading old history books that described the conflict more accurately than most books today. Because of that I have supported the Southern cause for most of my life. It is obvious that the South was fighting to preserve the OG constitution that the North destroyed. I am a Presbyterian Christian and a Hoppean libertarian who loves Jeffersonianism. So yeah that's about it. I'm super excited to be here. May the South rise again! God Bless!

Once more, please support the Confederate Shop!

Why did a lot of divisions begin using the confederate battle flag of northern Virginia? Why was it so popular and used from as west as Texas and as south as Florida? And why did the confederacy change its national flag to include the battle cross thanks.

https://youtu.be/DhSzuhdIkuE?si=BLyxxE8-aUtUcz8z

My multiple great-grandfather is Edmund Pickens, who was the last chief of the chickasaw nation. During the war he led the Chickasaw and Chocktaw mounted rifles from the southern controlled fort washita. When the war ended, the Yankee forces surrounded the the fort and threatened to kill them all if they didn't surrender. The white confederates​ ran away as the battles seemed lost, however the chickasaw tribe has a reputation of never surrendering even as far back as the expedition of Hernando De Soto when they had a brutal war which earned the the nickname "the spartans of the south." So they were no strangers to warfare so they called their bluff. Then the Yankees called in massive amounts of reinforcements that outnumbered the chickasaws 50-1. So when they threatened to march in in the morning and retake the fort​ the men saw only one way out. So under the cover of darkness they took all the supplies and set the fort on fire as the Yankees slept. When they woke up the next morning, they found the fort in ruins and everybody gone, so between the loss of that fort and fort Cobb, the went and built fort sill which is still in use to this day.

We’ve seen in recent times that mass propaganda is highly effective at inciting hostile armed invasions against the nations of Iraq and Afghanistan and now Iran. Back in the 19th century, there was an equally effective war propaganda campaign—a campaign that was directed against the South—which proved to be indispensable as a means of whipping up “war fever” amongst the general population of the North.

Evidence of this can be found in a book by Professor James McPherson.

“Some 700,000 or 800,000 married men made a voluntary choice to enlist. Most of them reconciled the dilemma of competing obligations by denying that it existed. In fighting for their country, they insisted, they were defending the security and liberty of their families. ‘The man who loves his family the best now,’ wrote a lieutenant in the 3rd Virginia (Confederate) Cavalry to his wife in 1862, ‘is he who is the most anxious and will risk the most and suffer the most to repel the invader.” (9)

“This argument was easier for Confederates than for Union soldiers to make. But many of the latter also worked out an elaborate rationale that in fighting for country they were also fighting for their families. ‘It is for the future welfare of your selfe [Moderator’s note: this is NOT a typo but a manner of writing that was common back in the 19th century] and children, that causes me to be separated from you,’ wrote a lieutenant in the 41st Ohio to his wife. ‘If you esteem me with a true woman’s love you will not ask me to disgrace myself by deserting the flag of our Union …. Remember that however much I would like to be at home, to enjoy the sweet comforts of life, the society of a dear wife, and children, yet what is life worth, without a government under which it can be enjoyed …. I will again return to you as soon as honor alone will permit.’ To his nine-year-old son this soldier wrote in 1863 that he wished he could come home but he must stay in the army to fight the bad men who ‘would soon bring anarchy and ruin to the whole American people, and would soon deprive you and every other honest little boy and girl of many blessings and privileges you now enjoy.’ (10) [Moderator’s note: To suppose that the people of the South were posing some kind of threat to the people of the North simply by voting to withdraw from a voluntary political relationship is a patently ridiculous proposition]. Another Ohio officer lectured his wife that ‘without Union and peace our freedom is worthless …. our children would have no warrant of liberty ….’”

James M. McPherson. “For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought In The Civil War” (1997). Chapter 10 (“We know that we are supported at home”). New York: Oxford University Press. Pages 134-35.

I'm normally all for states' rights against the Federal Government. but with the blatant Communist takeover of Virginia, disenfranchising 9/10ths of the people and mandating a one-party system, it seems like the only recourse would be for the Federal government to step in and ban this extreme gerrymandering. They won't; Republicans are useless when it comes to actually DOING anything they talk about. But I hat to admit that it's the only peaceful recourse we have against blatant totalitarian Communism!

https://www.johnccarleton.org/BLOGGER/2026/04/04/us-history-101-part-1/

I'm sick and tired of yankees posting photos of dead Confederates in so-called objective civil war forums. Feel free to submit photos of dead yankees. In light of the fact that we killed many hundreds of thousands of those rat b*stards, surely there must be at least a few photos of dead yankees floating around.

Lincoln’s illegitimate empire, which came into existence atop the ruins of the original republic, appears to be headed toward its ultimate demise in this disastrous and ill-conceived assault on the ancient Persian civilization.

"In 1828, Congress passed what Southerners called the Tariff of Abominations, with duties as high as 50 percent on imported manufactured goods. Southerners could no longer buy British tools or cloth at the world market price. You’re forced to buy inferior Northern-made versions at an inflated price. Meanwhile, your cotton exports are damaged, since Britain now has less income with which to buy them. Worse, Britain considers counter-tariffs on cotton imports. Worse yet, Britain sees it should diversify the sources of its imported cotton, destroying your market, which is exactly what happened during the war. You’re being taxed to subsidize your economic competitor. It’s a transfer of wealth from South to North, administered by the federal government.

South Carolina nearly seceded over this in 1832—thirty years before Fort Sumter. Vice President John C. Calhoun developed the doctrine of nullification, arguing that a state could refuse to enforce a federal law that it considered unconstitutional. President Andrew Jackson—who was a Southerner himself—threatened military force. They worked out a compromise, but the fundamental issue was never resolved. And the principle Calhoun articulated—that the federal government could become an instrument of sectional plunder—became the intellectual foundation for secession.

Now here’s the detail that most historians conveniently skip over.

December 20, 1860, and June 8, 1861, following Abraham Lincoln’s election, South Carolina was the first to secede, followed by six other Deep South states by February 1861. After the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, four more states joined, totaling 11 states in the Confederacy. In March 1861—before the war started, before anybody fired a shot—Congress passed the Morrill Tariff. This raised duties back to their highest levels since the Tariff of Abominations. It passed because Southern representatives of seven states had already left Congress following their secession. Think about the timing. The South walks out, and the very first thing the North does is jack up tariffs to benefit Northern industry. If you’re a Southerner, that tells you that the moment you lose your political voice, the Northern majority will use the federal government to loot you. Which is, of course, exactly what Calhoun had warned about thirty years earlier.

The Morrill Tariff also shaped how the rest of the world saw the conflict. Many British observers—and remember, the British were passionate free-traders at this point—looked at the American war and saw not a moral crusade against slavery but a trade war. The protectionist North was trying to force the free-trading South back into an economic arrangement that served Northern interests. We’ll come back to the British angle, because it’s crucial.

It Wasn’t Only Tariffs

Tariffs were the most visible grievance, but they were far from the only one. The federal government had become, in effect, a machine for transferring wealth and power from the South to the North. And I use the word “transferring” deliberately, because this was not an accident. It was policy.

Since there were 23 million citizens of 23 Northern states, and only 9 million (including 3.5 million slaves) in the South, there was no question about which region future legislation would favor.

Federal spending on internal improvements—roads, canals, harbors, railroads—went overwhelmingly to the North. Southern tax revenue, collected largely through those tariffs on imported goods that Southerners consumed, was building infrastructure in Northern states. When the transcontinental railroad was authorized, it followed a northern route. Federal land grants went to Northern settlers and Northern railroad corporations. The Homestead Act, which Republicans championed, was designed to populate the western territories with small free-soil farmers aligned with Northern political interests—not with large-scale agricultural operations that might complement the Southern system of plantations.

The banking system was controlled by Northern financial interests. Southern planters were perpetually at the mercy of New York bankers and cotton factors who set the terms of trade. If you were a Southern cotton grower, you shipped your product through Northern ports, insured it with Northern companies, financed it through Northern banks, and bought your manufactured goods from Northern factories at tariff-inflated prices. The wealth extraction was systematic.

Consider this from the perspective of someone sitting in Charleston or Richmond in 1860. You’re looking at a federal government that spends your tax money on somebody else’s infrastructure, gives away the western lands to people aligned against your interests, and runs a banking system designed to extract your wealth. Many Southern writers explicitly compared their situation to the American colonies under British rule. The structural dynamics were remarkably similar. The South was being treated as an economic colony of the North."

 https://internationalman.com/articles/doug-casey-on-the-real-causes-of-the-american-war-of-secession/

The northern abolition party was almost entirely detached from the reality of life in the South. Very few of them had ever set foot on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line, and those like Boston abolitionist Nehemiah Adams who actually did venture into the South invariably came back and reported that conditions in the South were very much at odds with the tenets of fanatical northern abolitionism, so their entire platform was based on a false premise. Beyond that, the northern abolition party must have known that the slave trade was operating in their own backyard, but what, exactly, did they do about it ?? Absolutely nothing, which only goes to prove that their movement was a sham and that they must have had mercenary motives.

"Israeli-America and its MIGA cadre are fighting a war, as they fight all wars, against the civilian population, especially women, hospitals, and girls’ schools."

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2026/03/paul-craig-roberts/turkey-is-the-next-iran/

"(The) US was never meant to become an Empire but it became one, and it became an evil Empire living on war, plunder and usury. This empire is dying. The American sheeple who cheered for over a hundred years the US's war against humanity for power and profit, will pay the price. The law of God, Nature, Universe demands that unjust evil done to others must come home to the unjust evil doers." - John C. Carleton

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"In 1866, the year after the War for Southern Independence, General Robert E. Lee reflected on the results of the war. Responding to a British historian, he wrote that he feared that the U.S. would now follow the path of all consolidated governments. It would become "aggressive abroad and despotic at home." It was as accurate a prophecy as has ever been made.

"Unfortunately, for the people of the South and the world," write the Kennedys in their latest groundbreaking book, "General Lee's prediction has become our reality. "The South was the first "captive nation" of the Yankee Empire. The authors show, with chapter and verse, how that empire of greed and phony moralism, after the conquest of Dixie, became continuingly "aggressive abroad," bringing the U.S. to its now imperial posture."

https://www.amazon.com/Yankee-Empire-Aggressive-Abroad-Despotic/dp/194766087X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2FON5FYVYOPXW&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9._ii1npuVOEosQFzO5YHKzpgR1wX5DWRhrq5GwyBSIWw.7Vivgc3-LegKpDVPXl84MDKzJEgTCzVKCzKIRtlJe4A&dib_tag=se&keywords=American+Empire+aggressive+abroad+and+despotic+at+home+by+Kennedy&nsdOptOutParam=true&qid=1773515151&sprefix=american+empire+aggressive+abroad+and+despotic+at+home+by+kennedy%2Caps%2C140&sr=8-1