

Was the South Ever Confederate, Anyway? - dghf
http://www.knoxmercury.com/2015/07/01/was-the-south-ever-confederate-anyway/

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dalke
The article considers these points to be relevant: "a large proportion of the
[white, male] people who lived in the South—perhaps even a majority—were
skeptical of the Confederacy.", "The Confederacy was not universally popular,
even in the South", and "in 1861 more than 30 percent of Tennessee’s
Southerners voted against secession, against joining the Confederacy. Well
over 30,000 Tennesseans took up arms against the Confederacy. "

An obvious question is, is that meaningful? Is that true of other civil
wars/succession movements?

We can easily compare it to the US independence movement. "Historian Robert
Calhoon said the consensus of historians is that between 40 and 45 percent of
the white population in the Thirteen Colonies supported the Patriots' cause,
between 15 and 20% supported the Loyalists, and the remainder were neutral or
kept a low profile." \-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_%28American_Revolution...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_%28American_Revolution%29#Influence)
.

This is easy to interpret as "a large proportion of the [white males] who
lived in the colonies—perhaps even a majority—were skeptical of the United
States", and that "independence was not universally popular in the colonies."

Another way to view the issue is that the people in the states of the
Confederacy were about as willing to support the Confederacy as people in the
13 colonies were willing to support independence.

In any case, who thinks that everyone (or even all white males) in the South
supported succession? The state of West Virginia exists because the northern
counties of Virginia didn't want to go along with the rest of the state and
"un-succeeded."

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mikestew
I think it's like a lot of things, whether it's leaving The Union, or
Snowden's NSA revelations: a lot of people can't be bothered. I do not mean
that to necessarily be a negative. In the case of the Confederacy (or even the
Revolutionary War), a lot of folks are just getting by, a war is always a lot
of trouble and expense, and in the end it probably benefits the well-to-do a
lot more than it's going to benefit me, the common person. Meh, I'm going to
go back to trying to get this year's crops in, let me know when it's over.

To put it another way, we all have different "causes". Me, it's animal welfare
(for example), for you it's getting those pesky Yankees off our backs. I'm
just not going to get as excited about the whole thing as the secessionists
are. I might even argue that those Unionists aren't quite as bad as you make
them out to be.

In summary, yeah, not everyone supported secession. Duh.

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cafard
The mountainous parts of the southern states tended to be unionist, I expect
in large part because the terrain made large slave-worked plantations
impractical. The most conspicuous case of this was West Virginia.

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serve_yay
Oh brother.

