White supremacists and counter protesters clash in Charlottesville

[Rev. Rye]

The majority of Confederate soldiers did not own slaves nor did they come from a family that owned slaves.  Most of them fought because their home state was invaded.  Studies of surviving Confederate soldier diaries find slavery rarely mentioned.  Hatred toward invading "Yankees" was much more common.

This is part of the turning the Civil War into a comic book thing I was talking about.  Some did fight for slavery, but most did not.

So you're honestly saying that most of those who fought for the south were absolutely against slavery, but as much as they were against slavery, they were even more against those no good rotten god damned assholes from the North who had the nerve to come to their state in an effort to end the slavery they were actually against in the first place. Is that what you're saying? Because that sure sounds like that's what you're saying.

Here's the thing: he's talking about the grunts who did the actual fighting; I recently rewatched Ken Burns' Civil War miniseries and I can remember Shelby Foote telling a story about a Union soldier finding a poor Confederate soldier in Virginia and asking him why he was fighting and he said "I'm fighting because you're down here." That said, there is one crucial thing Rahul failed to note: while many individual soldiers (up to and including Robert E. Lee) fought mostly in defense of their home states, there was a severe disconnect in why the troops fought and why the Confederate States of America had them sending them to war in the first place.

While the soldiers themselves might not have had "this is for the right to enslave black people" in mind when they fought (and it may not have been something most of them would have considered wrong), looking at the founding documents of the Confederacy, from the original articles of secession, to the constitution (mostly a copy of the US constitution changed to be more racist), and even the cornerstone speech by Confederate VP Alexander Stephens, it seems the actual powers that were didn't seem to have much else in mind.

Remembering this crucial disconnect between the motives of the people actually doing the fighting and who they were fighting for, the admiration many Southerners who wouldn't even identify as racist have for the Confederacy makes quite a bit of sense.