Quote:When has any war been fought for the beliefs or wishes of anyone other than the upper class? When have the personal beliefs of generals on social issues had anything to do with the reasons for going to war?


You have an incredibly naive and revisionist notion of the realities of those times. You cannot simply ignore the official declarations of secession by many southern states, nor the controversy over the potential admission of slave territories into statehood or the rhetoric of anti-abolitionist rhetoric leading up to the genesis of the civil war. Yes, it was about states rights, and chief among those rights was that of states allowing their most affluent citizens to own slaves.

Not ignoring just putting it in context. There was no agriculture anywhere in the world without slavery and agriculture was their lively hood. If the war was about the north wanting to free slaves there wouldn't have been slave states in the union, nor would Lincoln have waited so long to make the emancipation proclamation, I can go on and on.


Slavery was the final straw that pushed them to succession but flsprtgod was suggesting the civil war is what freed the slaves, that's not even remotely true.

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