Well, I figure that the whole North American population is enslaved...in a certain sense...but that's another whole discussion, isn't it? ;-) (I mean they are mentally and psychologically enslaved to an empty, materialistic lifestyle, devoid of wisdom...)

It's always a dicey question as to whether a part of any country can voluntarily leave. The part that does want to leave would, I think, have a right to. (Just as in a divorce...) But, the rest of the country never sees it that way, do they? I'll tell you why: money is at stake. lots of it. And land. And jurisdiction. Oh, people will tell you all kinds of wonderful reasons to get you whipped up about patriotism and go and kill your next door neighbours, but it's really turf that is being fought over. And that turf belongs to the rich, the robber barons, the politicians, the plantation owners, the bigwigs. That's what the rioters in New York were rioting against. The sons of the rich could buy their way out of the draft. The poor could not.

I figure if the South wanted to leave in 1861, then they had a right to. Fort Sumter was sitting on coastal land that was part of a southern state which had seceded. What the hell right did the Union have to stay in such a fort after the separation of the South? They should have left. I can understand why the South eventually attacked the place. IT was illegal in THEIR terms! On the other hand, if the South had been smarter, they would NOT have attacked it. They would have swallowed their anger and let the union troops sit in there forever on land that was not in the Union any longer.

The southerners let themselves be carried away by their own arrogance, patriotism, and martial spirit, and they played directly into the hands of the Union when they attacked that fort. It was the Union that wanted a big war, not the South. The Union had a purpose to the war: reunification of the original USA. The South's only purpose was to be left alone to govern themselves as they chose.

Yup. I call that an invasion. And so would you have called it, had you lived in the South at the time.

I see no more justification for the Union continuing to occupy forts on southern land than if the Confederates had been occupying a fort on Long Island or something. It's ridiculous. It's like that ridiculous Guantanamo base down in Cuba. It amazes me the nerve of the Red, White, and Blue when it comes to this sort of thing. Anyone's land automatically becomes their land, merely by virtue of their blasted flag flying over it.

The weakest link in the whole position of the South was the slavery issue...a thoroughly indefensible stand in a moral sense. Slavery had already been banned almost everywhere else in the western world by that time. I think, though, that it was more a propaganda issue, and that what underlay it was a struggle for economic and political dominance...one that the South was steadily losing, due to having a considerably smaller industry and population than the North.

The slavery issue served the same purpose as the "race card" in the O.J. Simpson trial. It was an emotional red herring, perfect for glossing over more prosaic issues and engaging the passions of the man in the street.

Lee, Jackson, and Longstreet were not fighting for slavery. They were fighting for the right to manage their own house on their own terms. They preferred dying on their feet to living on their knees...so to speak.

The D-Day invasion was a response to a previous invasion of a sovereign country. A rescue mission of an ally. It was in no way comparable to the War Between the States. There is no basis for such a comparison.

My definition of war is: One group of people organizes to deliberately attack, kill, and rob another group of people, under the auspices of a government, a religious hierarchy or some other form of temporal leadership. Then the fighting starts. After that, war takes its own predictable course of unmitigated disaster, willy-nilly, killing people en masse, until one or the other side can't fight effectively any longer. Then it ends with a totally unjust punishment being administered to the people who lost, and everyone takes a breather for awhile, and the losers quite likely keep it in mind to prepare quietly for their eventual revenge. If they're smart, they get revenge the way the Japanese did after WWII...not with guns, not with bombs, but by being better businessmen.