[albertabound]

Hmmmmm not a hellava lot has changed in the last 150 or so years.

[docmcb]

Heh, heh, heh. Here it comes.

[DallasMike]

This apparent absurdity allowed public opinion to support the South, but oppose slavery ....

This is not so absurd. By the time of the Civil War, slavery was beginning to lose support in the south just as it had lost support in the north a few decades earlier. Not only that, but a significant number of northerners didn't care a fig about slavery one way or the other.

[stainlessbanner]

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[Nat Turner]

Confederacy and Confederation -- sounds like a pair to me

[stainlessbanner]

bump

[albertabound]

Canadians in the Civil War.
http://members.tripod.com/PvtChurch/

[Servant of the 9]

War of Northern Agression PING

I think you will like this.

So9

[aomagrat]

"They sympathize with the South from a strong dislike to the aggression, the braggadocio and the insolence they have felt upon their own borders."

Bump!

[warchild9]

One should note that the underground railway stopped in Canada, not in the so-called Free States of the North. There are implications there few recognize.

[JohnGalt]

Northern Copperhead Abolitionists were more plentiful than the gubmint schools care to admit (much like black Confederate soldiers.) Most were forgotten because Lincoln clamped down on dissent with the full force of the federalis.

Joshua Blanchard was a Boston merchant who spoke eloquently on the importance of simply letting the South go:

...But the harmonious union of the people of this nation, on the principle of general consent, can never be maintained where the sentiments of the two great sections of it are at such irreconcilable variance on the vital question of the right to slavery...The only plan, then, for national reputation, for safety, for justice, and even for humanity, is to give each section an independent government, confirmed to its own ideas of right- that is, peaceable separation from each other.

[Verginius Rufus]

One small error--Jefferson Davis was not captured until May 10, 1865.

[stand watie]

as the WBTS was NOT over slavery, this makes sense.

the canadians were ALLIES in the struggle for dixie LIBERTY!

free dixie,sw

[Non-Sequitur]

So, if the war wasn't about slavery, what was it about?

The author is looking at the war from one side only, he needs to look at the southern motivation. From the Northern point of view it wasn't about slavery, but from the southern one it was.

"Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated Union to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquility and secure more substantially the blessings of peace and liberty to her people. She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution, under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings. She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. -- Texas Declaration of the causes of secession

[y2k_free_radical]

very interesting

[thatdewd]

The New York Times was indignant that a "war criminal" should be received so well in Canada.

If the NYT is against you, you must be alright.

[azhenfud]

"Seen through that lens, the war was about the North trying to impose its expansionist will on the South."

A lot of us still use that same lense.

[billbears]

The New York Times was indignant that a "war criminal" should be received so well in Canada.

Yep, the NYT is still getting it wrong. Most of the war criminals fought on the other side of the lines (i.e. Sherman, Grant, etc)

[x]

To many Canadians it seemed to be more of the American Revolution. The Canadian elite, like the British upper-class, saw Southerners as having the same right to leave the Union as the original Thirteen Colonies had to break away from the British Empire.

Not likely. Many of those Canadians' ancestors had needed to flee the thirteen colonies because they denied the right to break away from the empire. Maybe there was more to it than Schadenfreude or a feeling that the Yanks deserved their comeuppance or the desire to weaken a dangerous neighbor, but many a Canadian must have felt the rich irony or hypocrisy of supporting a "right" that his grandparents had denied and been persecuted for rejecting.

[mtbopfuyn]

The first American urban legend and revisionist history - the CW was fought over slavery. The South fought for States Rights. Yes, there were black soldiers and many were freedmen fighting for their own land. Yes, those very same freedmen owned slaves which too many prefer to ignore.