Blame the North for Big Government--- I DO
After the Civil War, Alexander Hamilton Stephens, the former Vice President of the Confederacy and a political theorist and historian whose insights have not received the attention they deserve, called attention to the late war and its aftermath as an example of the trend toward empire and centralization:
If centralism is ultimately to prevail; if our entire system of free institutions as established by our common ancestors is to be subverted, and an Empire is to be established in their stead; if that is to be the last scene of the great tragic drama now being enacted: then, be assured, that we of the South will be acquitted, not only in our own consciences, but in the judgment of mankind, of all responsibility for so terrible a catastrophe, and from all guilt of so great a crime against humanity.
