I understand Southern pride. I have it myself. But I swear I don’t understand why we don’t want to admit the war was fought over slavery. It was, you guys.
Maybe it’s not wanting to give an inch to people you think look down on the South. Some (not necessarily here) do just that, but who cares. We all run into Northerners who come down here and think they can improve the South with their liberal politics, their impatience on the behind the wheel, and their habit of wiping out the pastrami at the grocery store deli. We laugh at them, like they deserve.
We also don’t need to indulge any Northern self-righteousness, since that region profited like crazy from the slave-driven cotton trade. After the importation of slaves was banned, the building of slave ships continued there, in order to keep the slave trade going to the Caribbean and South America. Also, shipping black slaves from Maryland and Virginia to the plantations in the deeper South was financed by the North.
Pockets of slavery existed for a long time after the North ended the practice, and blacks pretty much caught hell up there after fleeing the South. There were no angels.
It’s also simple fact that the North entered the war not to end slavery, but to preserve the Union. Abraham Lincoln was not an abolitionist and believed—stated—that the North had no right to interfere in the Southern slave trade. It’s interesting...the old chestnut about history being written by the victors is true. You have to dig for some of this stuff. It’s amazing that some Northerners don’t know slavery ever existed there. I’m pretty sure they also don’t know that blacks were lynched in the streets of New York City in 1863. So there’s little room for anybody to get on a moral high horse.
As for the South, we fought to keep slavery as an institution. I’m sure most of the poorer men who took up arms did so for love of their home. I’ve read that many resented having to leave their families, homes, and crops when they had no slaves of their own...they felt it was a rich man’s war.
Only ninety years prior to the CW, the colonies beat the most powerful military force in the world and founded this country, unique in the history of the world, based on man’s God-given rights. “Confederate Constitutionâ€... we never needed a new Constitution.