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For over a hundred years Southerners have felt that the North was picking on them.

It's infuriating, this feeling that one is being picked on, continually, constantly.

By what right of superior virtue, Southerners ask, do the people of the North do this??

The traditional strategy of the South has been to expose the vices of the North, to demonstrate that the North possessed no superior virtue, to `` show the world that '' as James's Christopher Newman said to his adversaries ) `` however bad I may be, you're not quite the people to say it ''.