Here is a partial list of the tyrannical policies of Southern governments (to say nothing of slavery itself). The central and state governments of the Confederacy:

* instituted military conscription

* used forced labor in their government-owned factories;

* preached anti-capitalism in Marxist terms, denouncing the “wage-slavery” of the North

* adopted military aggression as its foreign policy;

* carried out untold numbers of warrantless searches,seizures, and arrests, starting early in 1861

* seized guns from civilians beginning in 1861(after the war, governments of Southern states would enact
the first gun control laws in the U.S.);

* printed paper money to finance military aggression, leading to runaway inflation;

* repudiated lawful debts and contracts;

* took political prisoners;

* silenced dissent, curtailing freedom of the press, speech, and assembly;

* instituted a welfare state;

* created, in less than three years, a bureaucracy of 70,000 in Richmond to manage the socialist
Confederacy;

* regulated agriculture by imposing acreage controls on cotton and tobacco;

* nationalized control of foreign commerce, regulating exports, raising tariffs, and banning the importation of all “non-essential” goods;

* occupied East Tennessee with thousands of troops to prevent the counties there from seceding from the Confederacy (as the counties of western Virginia did).

SOURCE: THE TRINITY REVIEW, Christians and the Civil War by John W. Robbins

“Here in the South one occasionally hears people refer to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression or the War for Southern Independence. They say it in jest, but there seem to be undertones of both resentment and deadly seriousness. Somehow , they think , the North aggressed against the South, an opinion based, not on history, but on Confederate mytho logy. Part of that mythology involves blaming Lincoln, not only for the war (anyone who thinks Lincoln started the war is seriously misinformed), but also for unconstitutional policies that led to the growth of government in the 20th century. This is a distortion of American history (the Progressive Era and the New Deal would seem to be more likely culprits) for the
purpose of defending slavery and the Confederacy by maligning Lincoln and the Union. Some of the pernicious policies pursued by the federal government in the 20th century either originated in the South or were the results of the war the Confederacy started.”

I think what you are laying out here is more clearly defined as a counterfactual rather than a fact.

I wasn’t trying point out flaws as much as I was addressing a discrepancy between the past and our collective memory. Again, I am not interested in making a moral point here. Finally, the counterfactual doesn’t really hold as we know that white Southerners were pushing for increased state intervention well before the start of the war to help subsidize and support an agricultural economy. I highly recommend checking out Majewski’s book.

Again, in order to fight a war, governments expand, and often do things the political leaders would probably criticism in other times. Look at WWII where a pro-labor President was put in the position to place limits on collective bargaining.