The soldiers were part of the confederacy. That makes them the same.
FALSE! Maybe you don't know what a soldier is. They follow orders, not make policy. They were not part of policy-making.
The soldiers were part of the only voting population, free white males -- who numbered just a bit over a million, and who voted for representatives that sought to maintain, preserve, protect and expand slavery. Overwhelmingly.
Eat that bit of south'n grit.
Again no, not "overwhelmingly" at all.
Narrates Wiki: >> Indeed, voting in the South was not as monolithic as the Electoral College map would make it seem. Economically, culturally, and politically, the South was made up of three regions. In the states of the “Upper” South, later known as the “
Border States” (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri along with the Kansas territories), unionist popular votes were scattered among Lincoln, Douglas, and Bell, to form a majority in all four. In the “Middle” South states, there was a unionist majority divided between Douglas and Bell in Virginia and Tennessee; in North Carolina and Arkansas, the unionist (Bell and Douglas) vote approached a majority. Texas was the only Middle South state that Breckinridge carried convincingly. In three of the six “Deep” South, unionists (Bell and Douglas) won divided majorities in Georgia and Louisiana or neared it in Alabama. Breckinridge convincingly carried only three of the six states of the Deep South (South Carolina, Florida, and Mississippi).
[17] These three Deep South states were all among the four Southern states with the lowest white populations; together, they held only nine-percent of Southern whites.
[18]
Among the slave states, the three states with the highest voter turnouts voted the most one-sided. Texas, with five percent of the total wartime South’s population, voted 75 percent Breckinridge. Kentucky and Missouri, with one-fourth the total population, voted 73 percent pro-union Bell, Douglas and Lincoln. In comparison, the six states of the Deep South making up one-fourth the Confederate voting population, split 57 percent Breckinridge versus 43 percent for the two pro-union candidates.
[nb 1] The four states that were admitted to the Confederacy after Fort Sumter held almost half its population, and voted a narrow combined majority of 53 percent for the pro-union candidates. <<
A map from the same page shows the diversity:
The yellow area is Bell, the Constitutional Union Party candy, and the green is the secessionist Breckinridge.
South Carolina is in grey because it had no popular vote.
And as previously pointed out, the area where I'm sitting, when put to a referendum on secession, voted "no", and stayed loyal to the Union.
Meanwhile in the same election, one of the states ran a referendum on
whether it should allow universal suffrage to black people. The measure was decisively defeated, 64% "no" over 36% "yes". The state was .... New York. Moreover Lincoln's Republican Party 1860 platform had taken the position
not to interfere with the institution of slavery in those states where it was still going on.
The moral is that all of this is not so black and white, pun intended, as we may reduce it to.
