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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.

Your statistics are misleading, perhaps intentionally so, because you state the number of individuals owning slaves (actually 393,375) rather than the percentage of families. In fact the percentage of families owning slaves in the southern states was very significant. When you consider that these must also have been the wealthiest families with the most influence, then it is reasonable to conclude that the continuation of slavery was a central cause of the civil war.

Percentage of families owning slaves: (1860 census data)

Mississippi________49%
South Carolina_____46%
Georgia____________37%
Alabama____________35%
Florida____________34%
Louisiana__________29%
North Carolina_____28%
Texas______________28%
Virginia___________26%
Tennessee__________25%
Kentucky___________23%
Arkansas___________20%

“then it is reasonable to conclude that the continuation of slavery was a central cause of the civil war.”

Yes, it was A cause. When you look at your figures, with states like Arkansas at only 20%, it’s also reasonable to assume it was not the ONLY or major cause.

It’s a shameful disservice to such a large population of our country to have revisionist politicians and academics defame the entire Confederate Army in a move that can only be termed the Nazification of the Confederacy. Their way of thinking goes something like this: Slavery was evil. The soldiers of the Confederacy fought for a system that wished to preserve it. Therefore they were evil as well, and any attempt to honor their service is a veiled effort to glorify the cause of slavery.

It’s a blatant use of the “race card” in a seemingly endless game . And it dishonors hundreds of thousands of men who can defend themselves only through the voices of their descendants.

Slavery may have been the catalytic issue from a governmental perspective, and its moral dimensions may have motivated many Northerners, but other factors, some cultural and some historical brought most Confederate soldiers to the battlefield. Region wide less than 5 percent of the whites in the South owned slaves and three quarters of the population had no economic interest in the maintenance of the plantation system.

Why would this boy, a non slave owning Jewish kid living in North Carolina, with both parents living in New York join up with the Charlotte Grays, Company C, First North Carolina Regiment in April 1861? Was it to protect his right to own slaves? No, he didn't own any. How about the rich plantation owners in the coastal counties rights to own slaves? NO, he could care less about them, they had no effect on his central NC way of life.
No, it was the threat from the North to take away every thing he had if he and the rest of NC did not join them in squashing the rebellion in South Carolina. That was the driving force the led to the final states saying they had had enough. Not slavery. Yes, slavery was a catalyst, but to say nearly a million boys joined up with one in four giving up their lives because of slavery is doing a huge disservice to the grandsons and great grandsons of our Revolution Patriots

Diary of a Tar Heel Confederate Soldier.
Charlotte, N.C.: Stone Publishing Co., c1913.

http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/leon/leon.html