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There was also was a time when many white and black Southerners joined forces to defeat the usurpations of a illegal and immoral attack on their Southern homeland.

It is too bad that too many Americans of all backgrounds think it was all about slavery. It was not.

While slavery was obviously a negative and an evil, I find the true nobility in giving your life for your family, community, values, and culture.

I think it helps to separate the motives of the political secessionists from the poor guys who did the fighting for them. The motive of the political secessionists were largely slavery and avarice. The poor guys who did the fighting for them were forced into a hard choice not of their making and many decided that the better choice was to choose to repel an outside army. But sometimes the invaders were the Confederates such as a June, 1861 incident in Cleveland, Tennessee where this Unionist community was threatened and intimidated by a passing regiment of Mississippi soldiers for the sin of continuing to fly the Stars and Stripes. In locales like that, the Yankees, with a significant contribution of local soldiers, were the liberators.

The Civil War was much more complex and convoluted than North versus South.

There was also was a time when many white and black Southerners joined forces to defeat the usurpations of a illegal and immoral attack on their Southern homeland.

No, there was not. Late in the war, Lee asked Richmond to offer freedom to enslaved blacks who would join the army. A relative handful did so. Early in the war some of the tiny number of descendants of freedmen tried to enlist as Confederates and were turned away.

Robert Toombs, Speech to the Georgia Legislature -- "...In 1790 we had less than eight hundred thousand slaves. Under our mild and humane administration of the system they have increased above four millions. The country has expanded to meet this growing want, and Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, have received this increasing tide of African labor; before the end of this century, at precisely the same rate of increase, the Africans among us in a subordinate condition will amount to eleven millions of persons. What shall be done with them? We must expand or perish. We are constrained by an inexorable necessity to accept expansion or extermination. Those who tell you that the territorial question is an abstraction, that you can never colonize another territory without the African slavetrade, are both deaf and blind to the history of the last sixty years. All just reasoning, all past history, condemn the fallacy. The North understand it better - they have told us for twenty years that their object was to pen up slavery within its present limits - surround it with a border of free States, and like the scorpion surrounded with fire, they will make it sting itself to death."

[Abraham Lincoln sworn in as President of the United States on March 4, 1861]

CSA Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, Cornerstone speech -- "...last, not least. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution -- African slavery as it exists amongst us -- the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the 'rock upon which the old Union would split.' He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact."