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As only a small percentage of the men and boys fighting for the South owned any slaves or had any use for them, I don’t see how offering them slaves as a bribe would work.

Most soldiers in the confederate army had no slaves or any land that one could work. They had no interest in continuing the institution of slavery and had nothing to do with why they were fighting. Most of them were fighting because there was an invading army attacking their towns. Slavery or not, most of them were determined to do their best to force the invader to a halt. Anybody would.

Exactly right.

Any time one of these Civil War threads pop up there are vultures educated by guilt trip the PC police lying in wait to post their anti-Sothern rant. I don't see their names on other subjects, but post a Civil War topic and here they come like clockwork.

They ignore the fact that when the South fired on Fort Sumter, beginning the war, there were eight slave states in the Union and only seven in the Confederacy. And The odds were greatly against the Confederate soldier even owning any slaves. And everyone in Gray were fuming that slave-owners in Delaware, Maryland, Missouri and Kentucky, the slave holding states that remained in the Union were allowed to keep their slaves. The Confederate soldiers who did not own slaves were fighting against a proportion of Union Army soldiers who had not been asked to give theirs up.

The 1860 census determined that there were fewer than 385,000 individuals who owned slaves. That would amount to only 1.4 percent of whites in the country or 4.8 percent of southern whites owning one or more slaves. There is no way that the continuance of slavery was the reason so many young boys left the non-slave family farm to join up with the army.