ONLY the 5-6 % of slave-OWNERS (about the same percent of northerners owned slaves as did southerners) cared enough about slavery to fight a skirmish over it, much less a war. over 90% of southern soldiers/sailors/marines had GROSS ASSETS in 1860 of 25.oo USD or less. they owned no slaves & couldn't have afforded a slave IF they had wanted to buy one.
furthermore, the common soldier of the CSA was "no friend" of the "planter aristocracy" (had the south won, the planters might well have been NEXT on the list of dixie's enemies!)and would NOT have "lifted a finger" to protect some rich aristocrat's "right to trade in human misery". they certainly would not have volunteered to bleed/die for that "right".
the VAST majority of the southern population simply wanted FREEDOM from a government that they believed was acting AGAINST their interests . it was really NO more complicated than that. (fyi, my family were poor farmers. the "Big House" was a distant socially/financially/educationally from our family 160-acre farm as the MOON!)
free dixie,sw
J.D.B. DeBow disagrees with you. In an 1861 article intended to convince non-slaveowners to fight for slavery, he states that 2.5 million southerners, about one in three or four, owned slaves.
http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~ras2777/amgov/debow.htm
In 1860, there were less than 500,000 slaves in the states that remained in the Union. That's a ratio of one slave for each 40 or so white people. In the seceded states, there was roughly one slave for each two white people.
How again did 5 or 6 % of northerners own slaves when slaves were only about 2% of the population of Union-loyal states, and all in border states?
A good many of the slaveowners of MO, KY and MD cannot be considered "northerners" by any fair standard, as they fought for the South, among them being all Mr. Lincoln's in-laws. If they weren't southerners, it wasn't for lack of trying!
The 5-6% of southern slaveowners as a percentage of the population were the "owners of record." Their wives and children, also slaveowners by any logical meaning of the term, were not counted into this group. While I suspect DeBow lets his enthusiasm carry him away, and it is doubtful 2.5M of the roughly 7.5M white southerners were slaveowners, probably at least 20 to 25% were. In some states such as MS slaveowners were an absolute majority of the white population.
Slaveowning families as a percentage of the white population by state, according to 1860 census.
Mississippi: 49%
South Carolina: 46%
Georgia: 37%
Alabama: 35%
Florida: 34%
Louisiana: 29%
Texas: 28%
North Carolina: 28%
Virginia: 26%
Tennessee: 25%
Kentucky: 23%
Arkansas: 20%
Missouri: 13%
Maryland: 12%
Delaware: 3%
I apolologize for overstating Mississippi ownership by 2% in a previous post. :)