Blue, thanks for posting the interview up. The book looks to be a very interesting read. I've posted up a short excerpt from the interview below. From "Bitterly Divided, The South's Inner Civil War", by David Williams:
Q: You write that most Southerners didn't even want to leave the Union.
A: That's right. In late 1860 and early 1861, there were a series of votes on the secession question in all the slave states, and the overwhelming majority voted against it. It was only in the Deep South, from South Carolina to Texas, that there was much support for secession, and even there it was deeply divided. In Georgia, a slight majority of voters were against secession.
Q: So why did Georgia secede?
A: The popular vote didn't decide the question. It chose delegates to a convention. That's the way slaveholders wanted it, because they didn't trust people to vote on the question directly. More than 30 delegates who had pledged to oppose secession changed their votes at the convention. Most historians think that was by design. The suspicion is that the secessionists ran two slates — one for and one supposedly against — and whichever was elected, they'd vote for secession.
Q: Was the inner civil war ever resolved?
A: No. As a result, about 300,000 Southern whites served in the Union army. Couple that with almost 200,000 Southern blacks who served, and that combined to make almost a fourth of the total Union force. All those Southerners who fought for the North were a major reason the Confederacy was defeated.
Respectfully,
Leland
Bringing the