[stand watie]

the BIG flaws in your analysis are that:

1. the damnyankees owned THOUSANDS of slaves themselves, which they planned to keep after the southland was beaten,

2.the many banks,insurance companies,railroads & other similar large business interests in damnyankeeland hurried in 1864-65 to protect their "rights to their slave property". unfortunately for the damnyankee revisionists, those records still exist.

3.no less a personage than MG benjamin "the beast" butler sent a letter to stanton asking him how the "contrabands" could be put in a "service of perpetual servitude".

4.high officers in the yankee army, as late as mid-1863 were still selling captured slaves & FREEMEN into slavery on the block in New Orleans. the African American museum in NO has the original documents of sale on public display.

unless you are willing to believe that the damnyankee elites were "men with two tongues, but no hearts" (as southrons & AIs have always said the damnyankees demonstrably are!) AND hateFILLED hypocrites, then by the damnyankees own actions,the WBTS was NOT ever about slavery!

for the south, the war was about LIBERTY;for the north the war was about imperialist conquest of a neighboring nation and/or attempting to coerce the southland to remain in a permanently subordinate position, relative to the north but within "the union of the unwilling".

free dixie,sw

[Agnes Heep]

You're getting yourself all worked up over nothing. I'm not trying to make pronouncements on the relative worth of the various factions vis-a-vis the slavery issue. The moral issue of slavery was completely different from the political and economic issues--indeed, it's difficult for us to judge ninteenth century attitudes by our own standards. But the economic and political considerations were concentrated in the South, and it was the South that decided that the perpetuation of slavery was an issue that trumped every other consideration.