[Colonel Kangaroo]

Hmmm. You a student of Hegel?

I'm not very well educated in philosophy, but what little I know of Hegel and his relationship to Marxist dialectic materialism, I don't think I like that!!! :)

But beyond philosophy, there was little change in immediate personal prospect for most Southerners no matter who one. The one big exception was the fear of slave insurrection which the Dixie movers and shakers exploited greatly. The power of this fear can be seen in the absence of support for the Confederacy in regions lacking significant slavery such as mountainous East Tennessee and regions in Northern Alabama. They had very little fear of militant slaves there so they correctly saw that Confederacy offered nothing compared to remaining united with the greatest government in human history.

[GVnana]

That's all too easy. I think it's safe to say the Confederate Army was made up of non-slave holders. Were they all dupes fighting for the elites? No.

Did you ever see the movie, "Gettysburg"? If not, I highly recommend it. At the end of the movie a Union soldier asks his prisoner, "If you don't own slaves, why do you fight?" To which the Confederate replies, "For our raaghts."

[Verginius Rufus]

After the Confederate Congress started a draft, but allowed one white man to be exempted on each plantation with 20 or more slaves, there was a saying that the war was "a rich man's war but a poor man's fight." I doubt the Southern soldiers had heard of Marx or Hegel. (There were some German immigrants who may have read their Hegel, but I think they were mainly on the Northern side...and Marx wrote a column for a New York paper during the war.)

My great-great-grandfather was a Confederate soldier, but I never got a chance to ask him his motives for fighting. I think he was too poor to own any slaves.

[Republic_of_Secession.]

Gvnana made a good observation because suggesting that the Confederates were tricked to fight in a rigged process which benefited only the rich based on your rigid two alternatives -which were not so different in the end: you are indeed proposing a Hegelian Dialectic.