[ColdNoMore]

Originally Posted by TimeForChange

With study and reading you will find that the majority of individuals who fought in the "War of Northern Aggression" (Civil War) for both the North and the South did not even own any slaves. So I guess they just fought for those who did. I seriously doubt they did that.

Instead of depending on short soundbites you may of heard (very likely from relatives) to obfuscate and downplay slavery, you might want to educate yourself...with a little real research.

I encourage you to read...this entire article.

You may even find one myth...that makes you feel better.



5 Myths About Slavery (click here)

2. Myth #2: The South seceded from the Union over the issue of states’ rights, not slavery.

This myth, that the Civil War wasn’t fundamentally a conflict over slavery, would have been a surprise to the original founders of the Confederacy. In the official declaration of the causes of their secession in December 1860, South Carolina’s delegates cited “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery.” According to them, the Northern interference with the return of fugitive slaves was violating their constitutional obligations; they also complained that some states in New England tolerated abolitionist societies and allowed black men to vote.

As James W. Loewen, author of “Lies My Teacher Told Me” and “The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader,” wrote in the Washington Post: “In fact, Confederates opposed states’ rights—that is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery.” The idea that the war was somehow not about slavery but about the issue of states’ rights was perpetuated by later generations anxious to redefine their ancestors’ sacrifices as a noble protection of the Southern way of life. At the time, however, Southerners had no problem claiming the protection of slavery as the cause of their break with the Union.

3. Myth #3: Only a small percentage of Southerners owned slaves.

Closely related to Myth #2, the idea that the vast majority of Confederate soldiers were men of modest means rather than large plantation owners is usually used to reinforce the contention that the South wouldn’t have gone to war to protect slavery. The 1860 census shows that in the states that would soon secede from the Union, an average of more than 32 percent of white families owned slaves. Some states had far more slave owners (46 percent in South Carolina, 49 percent in Mississippi) while some had far less (20 percent in Arkansas).

But as Jamelle Bouie and Rebecca Onion point out in Slate, the percentages don’t fully express the extent to which the antebellum South was a slave society, built on a foundation of slavery. Many of those white families who couldn’t afford slaves aspired to, as a symbol of wealth and prosperity. In addition, the essential ideology of white supremacy that served as a rationale for slavery, made it extremely difficult—and terrifying—for white Southerners to imagine life alongside a black majority population that was not in bondage. In this way, many non-slave-owning Confederates went to war to protect not only slavery, but to preserve the foundation of the only way of life they knew.