Wow, I'm impressed that Greg F has read so many books on the subject! :-)
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"...it was the slavery debate that brought first South Carolina and then other slave states to leave the Union."
And here I thought it was Lincoln's election -- which put the anti-slavery Republican party in control -- that was the catalyst for secession. The slavery issue had been debated since before the Revolutionary War, but until 1860 the government had been either on the fence about the issue, or in the slaveholders' camp altogether. When Lincoln won by clear majorities in the northern states, it was clear to the slaveholders of the South that the tide of public sentiment there had decidedly turned against them. Rather than stay in the Union and be legislated out of business, they decided to cut and run and do their own legislating. If the Confederate states hadn't come to hate the Confederate government nearly as much as the Union, and if their governments hadn't been so rife with corruption themselves, they might have had a ghost of a chance of staying together for longer than four years, but with the tide of foreign powers' sentiment against them as well, their collapse would have happened eventually.
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Sorry, JTT, but I don't have any family anecdotes to tell about any slave's loyalty to his owner during that time, since my roots are in Pennsylvania. I have a relative of that era buried in South Carolina, but he was a Union soldier who had died aboard an overcrowded transport ship that was sailing down the East Coast. (The ship dropped off his body at a Union fort in SC for burial, and he was later reinterred at a Union cemetery in Beaufort.)
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As to the charges of racism and bigotry that flared up earlier on this thread, I must say that when I read Akenaton's posts, it didn't appear to me that he was referring to "people like Azizi" as anything other than people with a "chip" on their shoulder, as he perceived it, that would render them less than credible. I don't think it was a racist comment. In fact, he repeatedly expressed agreement with Little Hawk's view that "we are ALL in favor of racial equality, we are all in favor of gender equality, and we do not have to change past history or censor old books by Mark Twain or somebody else like that in order to prove our righteousness to all the other people around us." I don't really know whether Azizi is a racist or not, but I've observed that she does seem to have an agenda that compels her to submit l-o-n-g posts with source material that is sometimes of questionable validity. I think she is too ready to accept opinions, at least those with which she agrees, as fact. And when others question those "facts", she gets self-defensive and leaves the thread discussions instead of considering the possibility of questioning her sources and modifying her stance. No bigotry there, just frustration with her style. *End of thread creep*