07-13-2015, 05:38 PM
(07-13-2015, 04:30 PM)RICHMONDBENGAL_07 Wrote: I agree with you (and the author in your post) that there is so much more to the Civil War. However I feel that usually when I see a post or article like this, that someone is trying to diminish or somehow lessen the issue of slavery and it's relativity to the Civil War. I'm not saying that is the case here, just skeptical.
I'm curious as to what the point is?
See Fred's
(07-13-2015, 05:13 PM)fredtoast Wrote: If I understand this article it seems to say that the South may have been fighting to preserve the institution of slavery, but the North was fighting to preserve the Union.
So while admitting that the South supported slavery it is also saying that the North was not really that strongly anti-slavery. While there were some very vocal abolitionist the main reason the North was fighting was to keep the United States united.
Pretty much. We tend to look at the Civil War through a lens of "good v. evil," which is something we do with a lot of wars. That lens creates the fiction that the northern states were fighting to end slavery, which was not the case at all. There were abolitionists in the north, but they were a small minority, and most of them still saw the slaves as inferior. They were fighting to keep the U.S. in tact.
It's interesting, because this points to something we often come across when looking at historical narratives. You take the viewpoint of all sides and mash them together to come up with something that looks more like the truth than any individual side is telling.
