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for the 5-6% of northerners & southerners, who actually OWNED slaves, the continuation of slavery was VERY important.

otoh, for the rest of the country, it simply was NOT a major issue, no matter how much you may WISH it was.to quote a former professor at Grambling University, "less than 10,000 people, north or south, cared enough about slavery to fight even one skirmish, much less a major war, over "the plight of the slaves". they SHOULD have cared;they did NOT." (emphasis: MINE)

in point of fact, about 95% of the CSA's military forces had GROSS ASSETS of 25.oo USD per person. ours was a PEASANT ARMY/PEASANT UPRISING, led by a handful of professionals like LEE,JACKSON & a FEW others.(fwiw, the "Planter Aristocracy" all too often COLLOBORATED with the enemy. had we won our war for LIBERTY, the collaborators would have been NEXT on the "list of enemies of dixie freedom")

that is the UNvarnished TRUTH. (that is the MAIN reason our ancestors lost the war. peasant uprisings SELDOM succeed. the only one i can think off offhand that DID succeed was the uprising against the French/Japanese in Indochina 1940-54.)

free dixie,sw

I guess we agree in our opinion of the planter aristocracy, but we disagree in that I think that the typical Southerner would have been better served by standing with the old Union and against the slave fanatics that led the South to ruin. That was also the opinion of Parson Brownlow and he had a good influence in the East Tennessee region through his writings in the Knoxville Whig.

otoh, for the rest of the country, it simply was NOT a major issue, no matter how much you may WISH it was.to quote a former professor at Grambling University, "less than 10,000 people, north or south, cared enough about slavery to fight even one skirmish, much less a major war, over "the plight of the slaves". they SHOULD have cared;they did NOT." (emphasis: MINE)

This is a quote Watie pulls out on regular basis, but he seems to have trouble with it.

For instance, a month ago, in a post to the Colonel, he says:
"the former Chair of History at Tuskegee University said that in 1860 there was no more than TEN THOUSAND people in the whole country, who cared enough about "the plight of the slaves to fight one skirmish over slavery, much less a WAR".

Note how the unnamed professor has changed colleges, and he's not just a professor, but the department chair. (The same chair, btw, as the oft-cited Prof. Blackerby)

A month before that, Watie tosses it out again, this time in an abbreviated form without any attribution as a quote, as if it's his own thought (nah, couldn't be):
" hardly anybody else cared about "the plight odf the slaves", either north OR south. they SHOULD have;they did NOT!"

Now let's set the Wayback Machine for 2002 and we find this:
"i had a former professor at Tulane, sadly now gone to glory, who stated that "you couldn't have found 10,000 people in the WHOLE COUNTRY, who cared a damn about the plight of the slaves; almost NOBODY was willing to fight either for or against slavery."

So now our unnamed professor is one of Watie's own professors, no longer at a historically black college like Grambling or Tuskegee, but at Tulane, and he's been demoted.

Back into the Wayback Machine just six days before the last, and there's this:
" a professor & friend of mine at Grambling University says that his calculation is that LESS than 10,000 people in the north cared anything about the slaves AND that the abolition movement was nothing more than an EXCUSE for the damnyankees to CONTINUE to dominate the south, politically,culturally & economiclly."

So our peripatetic professor is back at Grambling. Good for him. Maybe he'll get that chairmanship yet.

Watie usually tosses this one out once per Civil War thread. Stay tuned and see where the mystery scholar will pop up next.