Why wasn't there a Secessionist Movement in the South Until Recently

"Regarding the goals of the rebellion, we can distinguish between revolutionary and secessionist civil wars. This dichotomy corresponds to the Uppsala Conflict Project's (UCDP) disrinction between the type of 'incompatability' over which government and rebels are fighting. UCDP codes two types of incompatibility: “government” and “territory” (some conflicts are coded as involving both). In a revolutionary civil war, the incompatibility between government and rebels is over control of the government. The goal of the rebels is to overthrow the incumbent regime and establish themselves as the new government of that nationstate. In a secessionist conflict, the conflict is over territory. The goal of the rebels is not to take over the existing government but to gain independence from it for the population of a particular ethno-regional enclave. In short, their goal is to carve out a second nation from a portion of an existing nation-state's territory..." https://books.google.com/books?id=rSPjCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA3

Maybe I'm beating a dead horse here, but I have seen arguments that the ACW wasn't "really' a civil war--from people who apparently do not realize that there is such a thing as a secessionist civil war.
 

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
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Why wasn't there a widespread or even a fringe secessionist movement in the American South during Jim Crow? It seems really weird that the south would just lose the war and leave it at that. My mother who hails from Pennsylvania remembers moving down here in South Carolina as a child and she and the family got the feeling that because they were Yankees they were just a little bit above the blacks in the natives eyes. The culture of the Antebellum South survived for years in all of it's Yankee hating, racialist caste system, militaristic, lost cause of the Confederacy glory and it just seems strange to me that a culture so proud of it's distinctiveness from the rest of the country (almost nationalistic in fact), so despising of the rest of the country, with the memory of the Yankee invasion (in their eyes) almost seeming fresh in the minds of the people there 100 years after the fact, which had it's most cherished institutions under attack by the Yankees wouldn't have had at least a fringe separatist group. In fact it wasn't until the 1990's I believe until there rose a group called the League of the South a Southern Nationalist group which advocated and still advocates for separation from the United States. I've always wondered about this.

I actually admire the OP's question. It is an interesting one about a historical "dog that did not bark". The world is full of regions that made repeated secession attempts, yet the American South was "once and done".

To me, as a non-southerner, it suggests that the commitment to a separate southern nationhood was quite superficial, and when questions of racial hierarchy are removed from the equation, there is hardly any southern nationalist content left.
 
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