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Are you sure about that? After all, while the richer Southerners may have owned slaves, the vast majority of Southerners did not own slaves. Those majorities made up the armies that the North eventually crushed when they invaded the South. I’m sorry, but men don’t fight and die for something that doesn’t concern them, and slavery didn’t concern the majority of the South despite the efforts to revise our history. Their fight was over the rights of the States to determine their own future.

But the men who did the fighting were not the ones who engineered the secession. The Confederate soldiers had a tough choice to make and often were only motivated by a desire to defend their land. On the other hand, the secessionists' motives were generally much less honorable. I think a Tennessee politician of the day, Oliver P. Temple, had the secessionists figured out:

"The most powerful (motivation for secession), as it always has been, in revolutionary movements, was personal ambition. There was something peculiarly facinating to bold, ambitious men in the thought of forming a great slaveholding confederacy, embracing fifteen states over which they would bear sway; with an aristocratic class to support their authority; with cotton, the greatest wealth-producing staple the world has ever known, as the basis of unparalleled prosperity, and with an obedient, servile race to perform all labor, and minister to the comfort and wants of this superior class as long as governments should last. Of course this motive was concealed..."

With one exception, the ancestors of mine who actually owned slaves did not fight yet those who did not own slaves fought in the Confederate Army.

If the war really was about slavery, then why did one third of the the slave states remain in the Union? Those states were Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia. The latter was part of Virginia but left in order to remain in the Union.

Are you sure about that? After all, while the richer Southerners may have owned slaves, the vast majority of Southerners did not own slaves. Those majorities made up the armies that the North eventually crushed when they invaded the South. I’m sorry, but men don’t fight and die for something that doesn’t concern them, and slavery didn’t concern the majority of the South despite the efforts to revise our history. Their fight was over the rights of the States to determine their own future.

Good points. Slavery was not the central issue of the Civil War....it was over the rights of states vs the rule of the Federal Government.

Unlike the North, the South had men of all classes (rich and poor) fighting for their side. The North allowed the wealthy to buy their way out of the draft ($300). This caused riots in the North, as only poor males were being conscripted (America’s nastiest riot ever was the NYC draft riots in 1863)