I will rephrase my original statement: The entire southern political machinery was in favor of separating to form an independent state, and Lincoln was elected to office without as single Southern electoral vote. Whether this is right or not is should be the subject of a different debate. You can’t undermine the actual or forecasted political outcome of a given situation by assuming that its validity is based on a fair ethics debate. Hopefully this is the way that the world is moving but to ignore the reality of the situation, right or wrong, then or now, is to miss the whole political cause-and-effect that the OP is trying to get at.
The original question is why Russia is so interested in Chechnya. Certainly their proximity to a good portion of Russian natural resources places them in a unique situation, plus the fact that there were grievous injuries incurred on both sides over the last 20 years which neither side is willing to forget.
My assessment: Yes it’s f***ed up, yes there should be a way for people to just “get along”. I don’t however see how this has anything to do with the bombings and killings which are still happening on both sides.
I don’t believe that’s at all true. West Virginia exists because all of those counties of (then) Virginia wanted to remain in the Union. New Orleans voted about 3:1 to remain in the Union but were outvoted by rural Louisiana. Northern Texans were hung by the dozen for having Union sympathies. And then we have all the families on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line split over the issue, brother vs brother, not to mention a few ‘border states’ remaining in the Union with divided sympathies. Not a simple issue at all.
The war lasted 4 years, not 5. And with a great deal of restraint (or inaction if you prefer) on the part of General McClellan, which rather prolonged things.
This is all aside from the abolitionist nature of the war, pretty darn clear to everyone by the time of Lincoln’s awesome second inaugural address; the war was being continued to free what were finally being recognized as American citizens from bondage. I rather doubt the average slave, a large % of the antebellum South, was all hyped up about living in the Confederate States of America…
Eastern Tennessee was also pretty firmly pro-Union and, if I remember correctly, wanted to break from the rest of the CSA but couldn’t for one reason or another.
Plus, there’s Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland, slave states all, fighting for the Union even though only the first is indisputably Southern.