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requiring a certain thinking about how to create a new nation.
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A fourth possible explanation--
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though I wouldn't hang too many hats
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on this one because it's rather vague;
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it used to have a lot of purchase among historians--
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is what we might call agrarianism, the agrarian thesis,
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the idea of King Cotton ideology, or King Cotton diplomacy,
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or put more deeply, a kind of Jeffersonian yeoman idealism.
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This is the vague theory that secession was
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to protect an agrarian, agricultural, planter civilization.
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That the South was ultimately--
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they liked to think of themselves, even the leadership--