@Smokin Joe 's bitter screed reminds me that Southerners have always had an uneasy relationship with the Republican Party. The GOP is unashamedly the Party of Lincoln, which indeed fought a war to unify a nation and, in the process, cleanse it of the moral stain of slavery. It is the GOP that passed the 14th amendment that added the Constitution's guarantee of the law's equal protection. It is, in that sense, the party of the North, and the Democrats the historic apologists for the slavers' lost cause. It was Nixon who changed that, and turned the GOP into a party that could attract Southerners. Today, of course, it is dominated by them, and it is Republicans like me that are in the eclipse.
I don't have rose colored glasses; the GOP and the North created with Reconstruction and the failure to carry through with it the conditions which spawned lynching and the reaction of Jim Crow. It was Southerners who insisted on Jim Crow, and the North was too spineless to resist it. But, again, the defining mission of the GOP as set out by Lincoln itself was reconciliation, and it would take a century to understand that acquiescing to southern whites' bitterness would lead to today's identity politics by creating a wound that could never heal.
How conveniently you leave out the Northerners' slaves ( Newport, Rhode Island, was one of the busiest ports of the slave trade), and the actions of their Generals, hanging civilians in the South (George Armstrong Custer was one of the worst).
I suppose you are going to tell me the North never had 'those people' come and go by the 'servant's entrance', wait on a different bench and drink from different water fountains--in Washington DC, even (don't bother, I saw it). As I said, spare me your sanctimony.
When the South no longer gave the consent of the governed, a requirement for 'just power', the North invaded and imposed it, murdering and burning along the way. The aftermath was often overseen by Yankees or their appointees, or the slim pickings offered in sham elections supervised by the occupiers. The post bellum problems are a result of those policies, and not native to the South, but imposed by a conqueror, not a 'reunifier'.
