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"To be perfectly fair, about 40% of these deaths were among those fighting to prevent the freeing of the slaves. Also the 600,000 includes a significant percentage of blacks who died fighting for the North, and a very small percentage who died fighting for the South."

This concept of the (I'll call it what most of you are used to seeing it called) Civil War having something to do with slavery is utterly and completely absurd. The war began because a number of southern (supposedly sovereign, but what good is sovereignty if you're invaded for exercising it?) states seceded from the union of states. The repurcussions of the secession, and the resulting freedom of the Confederate States of America would have been absolutely devastating to the North, economically. If the North had had a reasonable agricultural base, rather than being so heavily dependent on manufacturing (and the South's largely agrarian economy), that war would never have been fought.

If this were truly a war about slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation would have begun the war. Instead, it was not issued until more than a year and a half after the war had begun. If this was a war against slavery, what on Earth were they doing for the 21 months between the time fighting began, and the time slaves were declared free by ~~Emperor~~ President Lincoln?

The secessions began because of northerns' meddling in the afairs of southerns'. They began because northern states, having majority power in Congress, sought to force their collective will upon the South. They began when a man who was not even on the ballot in many parts of the South was elected President. I think South Carolina said it best in its Declaration of Secession, when it declared: "We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States."

They seceded by the very principles contained within the Declaration of Independence. That may seem a bit odd, as the holding of slaves is itself, contrary to the principles contained therein. Do not forget, however, that southerns too saw the end of slavery in sight. What they also knew is that to simply end the institution suddenly would bring down most of the nation, but most especially the southern states. Thus, the influx of new slaves was stemmed, and a gradual move to a better, freer system was begun. That the North decided to exercise punishing control over the South via the legislative and executive branchs of government is the reason the South seceded - and was right to do so.

As for the massive numbers of casualties, much of that you can blame on a single man. William T Sherman left a 60 mile wide, 300 mile long (that's 1800 square miles for you folks keeping track at home) trail of death and destruction. The outright slaughter of men, women, and children was the dream of a genocidal maniac whose purpose was, in his own words, "extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least of the trouble, but the [southern] people". In a later letter to the Secretary of War, he wrote: "There is a class of people men, women and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order."[my emphasis] He wasn't merely after the people you'd think he would be, either. Sherman's army murdered slaves en masse with no hesitation. A common tactic used was to string up a slave by his neck, choking him until he told them where they could find the master's valuables. He boasted in his memoires that his men destroyed $100 million in property (think 1860s, somewhere along the lines of 15 - 20 times that value in modern terms), and looted another $20 million.

Sorry for the long post, but I get a bit bent out of shape when I see people calling that a war against slavery. That's a myth created by union army apologists to make themselves feel better about the wholesale annihilation of a nation, and of a culture. It's something they can wrap around that war to blot out the massacres, the war against the civilians (free and slave alike), and the attempted genocide. It was, is, and always will be a war waged over economics; at least from the northern perspective. As far as the South, it was fighting for the most basic right of all - the right to determine its own destiny. It was, a War of Northern Agression.

I wondered if any of the southern apologists would react.

It is true that the war was not exclusively, especially in its early years, fought by the Union as a campaign against slavery. However, that's just a little like saying that WWII was not fought to rescue the Jews from extermination. Although true, it is irrelevant. Had the South won, the slaves would have been freed much later than they were. Had the Nazis won, they would have indeed wiped out the Jews.

It is also true that the hostility between north and south that led to secession was almost entirely based on the conflict over slavery.

You guys crack me up. Every institution in the US, from religious denominations to political parties, broke in two in the decade before 1860. In each case, the cause was disagreements about slavery. Yet when the country itself breaks in two, somehow that is over tariffs or abstract rights of secession.

It's a little like when a woman files for divorce. You would claim that she's merely exercising her right to divorce, ignoring the fact that she wants out because she's angry at her husband about his girlfriend.

Similarly, last-ditch efforts were made by highly intelligent men to save the Union in the closing days of 1860, the Crittenden Compromises, a series of constitutional amendments intended to address southern concerns. Every single one dealt with slavery issues, not tariffs or any of the other red herrings tossed out by Confed apologists.

I guess Old Man Crittenden (a Kentuckian and slaveowner) and all of his supporters were just too dumb to realize slavery had nothing to do with secession.

It is true, in a rather irrelevant sense, that the war was not ONLY about slavery. It is equally true that slavery was the primary cause. No slavery, no war.

If the North had had a reasonable agricultural base, rather than being so heavily dependent on manufacturing (and the South's largely agrarian economy), that war would never have been fought.

You are just showing your ignorance of history here. The North was heavily industrialized at the time only in comparison with the South. The vast majority of the Union population lived on farms. Most Union soldiers were farmers.

During the course of the war, northern farmers not only fed the Union armies, they also exported huge amounts of food to Europe which largely paid for Union imports of armaments.

Prior to the war, the South imported a great deal of its food from northern and border states, as southern plantations were highly focused on production of such cash crops as cotton.