As a guy who moved to the suburbs to get the hell away from Seattle politics, I’m not against that interpretation. A giant sea monster rising up out of Puget Sound Pacific Rim-style would do Seattle some good.

This is wrong up and down the board.
It’s true that ‘the north’ as a monolith wasn’t totally concerned with slavery. It’s why there was opposition to the war, and why Lincoln only got 40% of the popular vote in 1860.
But secession was precipitated by Lincoln’s election because of his abolitionist sympathies (and the…

The whole “America was built on the backs of slaves” argument sort of ignores that embracing slavery kept the south in a backwards agrarian economy when everyone else was transitioning to industry, railroads, ect. So the south never really stood a chance in the war to begin with, as slavery held them back in the 18th…