I don’t disagree with you about the evils of slavery and even worse, the slave trade. That said, it was a dying “institution” by the 1860s. We were taught in school that the war “about” slavery and was “necessary” to get rid of it. I accepted that for many years. Then I read more about slavery and discovered that every other country in the entire western world got rid of it without a bloodbath. So that really wasn’t “necessary” after all.
Then I started studying the issue more for myself - reading what historians from earlier generations had said. I learned about the Corwin Amendment for the first time. I learned about how the Tariff benefitted one region of the country at the expense of another AND how the fight over the tariff did not end with the Nullification Crisis and it struck me how I wasn’t taught any of this in school. I realized I had only been taught one side of the story....that I’d been given a very slanted view of things and had not been taught half the facts. It was enlightening especially given how the corporate media constantly lies about everything today to push one worldview and benefit one party at the expense of the other and at the expense of anybody they perceive to be a political enemy......
and I realized how massively we had been propagandized about our history....how it had been rewritten 1984 style to benefit one region of the country at the expense of another and how it had been slanted that way to benefit one worldview (centralized power) at the expense of another.....how anybody perceived to be an enemy of that (ie Southerners) had been and were being demonized really starting in the late 1980s by the Leftists in Academia.
Interestingly enough, the slaves actually received about 40-50% of the value of their labor.
SpyNavy
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)