One thing that hasn't been explained is why so many people who never owned a slave in their life (because the majority of southerners did not) would take up arms to fight the north, if it was purely about slavery and not about something more.
Unfair taxes is a biggy! Northern rail road control over product movements, taxes and tariffs on southern goods shipped to northern states, all disproportionately! The north holding dominance over the south was untenable, and the south exhausted all legal means available to it! Slavery barely registered on the long list of grievances!
Yes, my question was a bit facetious. There is a lot more to the civil war than just slavery. That's just the way it's portrayed to make it appear as a holy endeavor and portray one side as clearly the good side and the other as not. Weird how the emancipation proclamation didn't happen until well into the war if the war was primarily about slavery. Wouldn't the north have started with that?
Explained by me, or explained by historians and sociologists? They would say:
By you, I've listened to others explain it.
I don't think the Union was all good. But I do think that there is nothing defendable about slavery.
Hence the term "poor white trash" as in "I might be poor white trash, but at least I'm not a . . . "
On that we are in complete agreement, but the war wasn't entirely about slavery either, and most of the southern soldiers who fought in it never owned slaves and most of the southern inhabitants didn't either.
Except it was, and the guy dying almost never has an actual stake in what they are dying for
You can say it was… but you'd also be ignoring what is very much discussed by historians, and already cited as other reasons.
Take away slavery, and there weren't any other issues. But when you have a massive economy with just two products and a handful of people that benefit from that economy, you're going to find that every tariff, interstate commerce law or transportation act is possibly going to impact you. Especially when the votes you do have in congress are based on 3/5s of a lot of your population.
Because it was a meaningless proclamation (or would have been had the South won) that only affected "States in rebellion" and slavery had already been legislated out in the North by around 1804, almost 60 years before the Emancipation Proclamation
The war was not about slavery, from the perspective of the north. Which is why the north didn't immediately ban it. The north fought to maintain the union.
So the north would have been fine to maintain the union had the south acquiesced to everything the north wanted except the end to slavery?
Again, people are not organized into monoculture hive minds. The proposals at the time were for exactly that - leave the South alone but stop expanding slavery. The South didn't like that because it put them in a minority and they assumed that the rest of the country would eventually force an end to slavery.
I don't think anyone said that and not sure why you would think that anyone believed that
I would argue that the Army wasn't evil.
