Many white people were tariffed of ending slavery, because they were afraid of what the newly freed black people would do. Many of there fears were irrational. One of the more rational things they feared was them driving down wages by being willing to work for less money.
Many believed that no matter how lousy their life was, it would be worse if all those slaves were suddenly freed and allowed to roam the countryside. There is a groundbreaking movie called The Birth of a Nation (1915) that plays upon those fears. It shows how the South was deteriorating after the Civil War and was only saved by the KKK.
Slavery was one of the reasons for the Civil War, but not the only one. Economic independence (especially in relation to foreign trade) and the desire for autonomy of the southern states also played a role.
I’d be willing to go as far as stating that Lincoln’s main reason for abolishing slavery was to weaken the South economically, not some grand idea of freedom and equality for all. North simply had less to lose from it.
Taking this into account, it’s not hard to imagine that many poorer southeners would see this as fighting for freedom and independence of their states.
The issue is, that it was not, by any means, just the rich.
The rich owned the majority, and, you can point to plantations as a great evil, easily.
Anywhere from a quarter to a third of southern families owned slaves, or, more precisely, one or more slaves. This is counted as individual owners. Men, almost exclusively. Not JUST men, but the eldest man, so, a father might be the listed owner of 10 slaves, and not his 7 sons and 3 daughters, but all of them were owners. Counted as “members of slave owning households” then, where a slave was owned by one member of the household or property, a MAJORITY owned slaves.
The issue gets weird, because you could rent them–for terms of years. So, they might be owned by a major plantation, and your family doesn’t own one, but, like a lease, you could have had one in your property or in your business, for their –or your–entire life.
Many slave owners did this to apprentice slaves out to trades, allowing them to learn blacksmithing, tannery, etc, so that they could have them come back to the planation and provide those services. Upwards of 90 percent of southern white households would have had partial or full possession of at least one slave, for part of the year.
That is partly why they fought so hard. They were, very much, active participants in the system of exploitation.
Well a post about something 160 yrs ago…and ppl can’t NOT talk about Trump, Reddit ppl can be so annoying…
The civil was about more than slavery. It was a topic but tue subject was the government telling ppl what they could and couldn’t do and ideological differences.
The south tended to be where ppl who were more isolationist. They wanted land and to live a more self sustained life and didn’t want government oversight.
The north was progressive and big city, big business, and ambitious. Think of it as country living vs big city living.
So they had very different ideological differences and there were events for a few years that lead to the attack by the south (forgot the fort name) in 1861 that started the Civil war. States wanted their own rights (slavery being one of them), and also the south didn’t want to expand the country west, Everyone fought because they felt it was the way to protect their ideology/ freedom. Wasn’t just about slavery and people who couldnt afford them fighting the riches war.
because having the class structure being based on color ensured that white people never fell to the bottom of the rung of the socioeconomic ladder. Pre-war no matter how bad of a financial situation a white person got stuck in they’d never have to do the most arduous labor, working the longest hours, as that was reserved for black slaves. Post-war white sharecroppers were working themselves to exhaustion picking cotton just as black sharecroppers were.
Because there was more to it than just slavery. Slavery was by far the biggest thing but it was about states rights as a whole. The reasoning being if they take away the states right to decide whether they can own slaves, what other rights are they going to take next.
On top of that propaganda lead the common people to believe that if the slaves were freed, it would make life worse for everyone.
Slaves in the north did not want to be set free from their owners. They were treated good and like family. The south was ran with rich democrats that used money and power over them and abusing and killing them . That’s what started the war . The government uses it today to keep everyone divided so no one stands together against any tyranny. Ultimately leading us into martial law !
It didn’t matter what the reason was, a armed force was coming in to their region and it wasn’t like the expected the union to treat them kindly and sit down and have tea.
If you lived in a southern town, or really any town, and an “invading army” has declared war on your region, your first thought isn’t that they’ll be nice to you and just go on through.
It’s that they will rob, rape, pillage and plunder as they go through your place (at least that was what they thought would happen).
General Shermans army needed supplies, they weren’t limiting themselves to getting those supplies only from slave owners. What they needed, they took, from where they could get them.
The average southerner in the confederate army probably didn’t give 2 shits about the political issues or slavery or anything else. They saw it as defending their towns, their homes, their families from a foreign invading force that did not mean well for them. It’s the same reason a lot of populations fight in a war against a foreign invading force.
In their shoes, they had a legitimate fear of what could and was going to happen when the union came through and they also had no idea what would happen if the union outright won the war (we know what happened today, they had no idea what was going to happen or could happen, so they assumed the worst).
Keep in mind that the union was following a theory of “hard war”, they weren’t fighting using a theory of minimal damage or surgical tactical attacks. Heck, the union ripped up the railroads and tied them into bow ties on trees. Now imagine in that era how stories and gossip traveled and misinformation.
If you are a southerner and you see that, you probably shit yourself. Also keep in mind that in war, a lot of bad things are going to happen. Thats the nature of war. The burning of Atlanta is still referenced to this day.
So these folks thought, in their heads, they were defending themselves against a foreign invasion that was out to destroy them.
Just for some perspective, Maryland was a union state…and the union STILL invaded and occupied it (albeit this was by necessity and did make sense but its not like the folks there saw it that way. Heck the state song made negative references to Lincoln (and only changed in 2021).
The average confederate soldier didn’t think he was fighting for slavery or for the government or for the rich. He thought he was fighting to defend his own home, his own town and his own family from an invading force.
Part of it is where the States Rights nonsense comes in. Propaganda told poor Southerners that the North was attacking their way of life after finding a way to make it sound morally superior. They said that if they accepted abolition, then the North would come for the other differences next, so the states must be able to protect the Southern way of life by maintaining their rights to maintain their own separate laws. Some people who spread this believed it and some wanted to preserve their own power and wealth. I know my extended family sent many to die for “the cause”, while only one immediate family out of many owned any slaves. Most common people believed they were fighting for everything they ever knew or loved, not for the privileges of the rich
Because the south wasn’t really fighting for slavery till the Emancipation Proclamation. The war started because the south seceded and the north refused to vacate FT. Sumter.
there’s a story where a southerner was asked by a northerner why they were fighting, and the southerner simply replied “because you are here” ie invading the south
Same reason why young, working-class Americans once fought a war in support of the fascistic South Vietnam regime even though North Vietnam had absolutely no intention of ever doing harm to the US. In part because they drank the kool-aid and in part because their asses were drafted.
But actually, a poor southerner in the Civil War had much better cause to fight than anyone who went to Vietnam or Iraq, because Union troops did actually burn down their cities in the end. Are the rich slave owners chiefly to blame for it all? Yes, I think so, but there was definitely a point in the Civil War where a grunt in the Confederate Army was actually defending his home.
Old-fashioned sense of duty (similar to a lot of Northerners). Racism. The draft. Some of them didn’t. A lot of dirt-poor people of Appalachia didn’t care much for the plantation-owners and thought it was a rich man’s war. Some even went north and fought for the Union.
Likewise, while a lot of Northern soldiers were young, idealistic, even educated and anti-slavery, most of them joined the fight because the other men their age did.
When you’re just a lowly worker and it’s the end of the day, people are killing your family friends and community members. Eventually, you gotta fight even if you’re against it all.
The majority of slave owners in the Antebellum South only had one or two slaves. This is the reason why so many fought to maintain slavery. Their very survival depended on those extra hands. The extra large plantations did exist but they were fewer than the majority of single owner, small plot farms.
There’s something that I don’t see being mentioned, but the ability to own Slaves was seen as an aspiration. It’s the same now with designer clothes and expensive cars. In the south, the people who considered to be “The Best” among them owned slaves. Even if they only had one, owning a slave meant you were somebody.
Don’t get it wrong, a small portion of the southern white population owned slaves, bust nearly all of them wanted slaves as well.
The ones who worked on plantations themselves, or other slavery-dependent industries, understood which side their bread was buttered. There were plenty of loyalist Southerners otherwise, as well as plenty of Southerners who sought creative ways to shirk military service because they didn’t particularly feel attachment to the cause. The old school Southern hillbillies in the Appalachians (the poorest group of whites generally) explicitly didn’t go over to the CSA explicitly because they didn’t depend on slaves.
I would also consider how western culture saw wars. All of them were fought with muskets etc this changed once the machine gun was introduced during the civil war, so it’s very different today.
At the time every young man was excited to go fight. It was a chance to leave the farm, go on an adventure and make some real money.
The carnage from the machine changed our attitudes a bit about war before WWI now meant many would never make it home again.
I see it as political ideology + personal gain = enlistment.
I have found the most interesting sources are newspapers from the turn of century, tens snd 20 in whip they would interview older adults that children/young adults during the civil war
Barbarisms by Barbaras
With pointed heels
Victorious Victorias kneel
For brand new spanking deals
Marching forward, hypocritic
And hypnotic computers
You depend on our protection
Yet you feed us lies from the tablecloth
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, ooh
Everybody’s going to the party
Have a real good time
Dancin’ in the desert
Blowin’ up the sunshine
Kneeling roses disappearing
Into Moses’ dry mouth
Breaking into Fort Knox
Stealing our intentions
Hangers sitting, dripped in oil
Crying, “freedom”
Handed to obsoletion
Still you feed us lies from the tablecloth
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, ooh
Everybody’s going to the party
Have a real good time
Dancin’ in the desert
Blowing up the sunshine
Everybody’s going to the party
Have a real good time
Dancin’ in the desert
Blowin’ up the sunshine
Blast off, it’s party time
And we don’t live in a fascist nation
Blast off, it’s party time
And where the fuck are you?
Where the fuck are you?
Where the fuck are you?
Why don’t presidents fight the war?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why don’t presidents fight the war?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why do they always send the poor?
Kneeling roses disappearing
Into Moses’ dry mouth
Breaking into Fort Knox
Stealing our intentions
Hangers sitting dripped in oil
Crying, “freedom”
Handed to obsoletion
Still you feed us lies from the tablecloth
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, ooh
Everybody’s going to the party
Have a real good time
Dancin’ in the desert
Blowing up the sunshine
Everybody’s going to the party
Have a real good time
Dancin’ in the desert
Blowin’ up the sun
Where the fuck are you?
Where the fuck are you?
Why don’t presidents fight the war?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why don’t presidents fight the war?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why do they always send the poor?
They always send the poor
They always send the poor
This is an interesting question with nuance to the answer. To be clear before I give a nuanced answer, the civil war was overwhelmingly about slavery, any other reasons give, such as states rights or tariffs, go back to slavery. With that out of the way, it is helpful to compare the civil war to a modern war, since we have research data.
With the US in the Iraq war, why did the US go to war? I won’t give a definitive answer, but the majority of Americans thought on the eve of war that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had aided in 9/11. I hope that we can broadly agree that this was not true, even if the majority of Americans thought it was true.
The point I’m making is that the reason that people go to war is not the same as why leadership goes to war. There were southern low-ranking soldiers that fully believed that preserving slavery was worth fighting and dying over, even if they didn’t have slaves. There were also southerners that enlisted because they wanted an independent nation, or to defend their country, for glory, or out of a sense of duty. There are as many reasons as there were people who enlisted. The fact that soldiers enlisted for a variety of reasons can be found in every war in history, but for some reason with the US civil war there are a lot of people that try to use this fact to pretend that the war was not about slavery. The truth is that these are separate things.
Not only rich people owned slaves. Slaves could be inherited or gifted, or only one could be bought, and they could be rented.
Confederate fighters were drafted by their illegal government and sometimes shot for desertion.
They volunteered to fight because their whole economy was based on slave labor, whether they owned slaves or not. No slaves would mean no crops to sell and no economy. Many whites were employed as “overseers,” and those jobs would not exist without slaves. Slaves built white homes and took care of white babies and otherwise were forced to work in physically demanding roles. Slaves were raped without recourse. The Confederates liked all that.
They were terrified of slaves potentially becoming free, especially in states where slaves outnumbered citizens. They were afraid of being attacked, and they were afraid of former slaves voting.
They were evil people who thought of Black people as not really human and wanted to keep them subjugated.
Have you been paying attention to American politics recently? A whole bunch of really poor people just elected some really rich people again. Even though they have raised their taxes over and over again while giving tax breaks to really rich people. To keep it as simple as possible… rich people are really good at convincing poor people that they know what is best for them.
They probably told them that it would destroy the economy, told them that the slaves were going to take their jobs and pay, and that free uncontrolled slaves were going to ruin their way of life and culture.
Without reading anyone else’s reply, I have 2 responses. 1) Rich folk and slave owners knew it was a war for, or against, slavery, but I bet they sold it to the common folk as northern aggression, us-against-them. 2) Peer pressure (going along with the us-against-them mentality because they were afraid of how they would be perceived).
I see this evident right now in the U.S. : Rich manipulating the middle class and poor, us-against-them mentality, peer pressure not to stand up against others in the community.
Have you considered possibility that on both sides many people hated members of opposing political party with passion and was willing to fight not on the issue, but purely for their side and against their rivals?
Many people in what we would now consider upper-middle class owned slaves.
Sure, they didn’t have plantations and dozens of acres of tobacco fields that required a labor force of enslaved people, but many families had 1 or 2 slaves.
Hard as it may be, imagine a world where slavery wasn’t morally repugnant… for what was equivalent to the price of a luxury good (car, motor home, boat, etc.) you could buy and own a person to do all of your household duties, in a time that they were much harder. You could own a small group of people who you could force to care for your property or moderately sized farm. This doesn’t even get into the even more horrific reasons people viewed owning slaves as a benefit like rape, etc.
The Southern Plantation has become the reference for slavery in America, but the reality is it was much more pervasive at an average domestic level than people realize.
So, if it was only the rich the civil war may have never happened, but since it was more broadly the political class of merchants, professionals, and mid-sized farmers, it made the process easier.
They wrapped themselves in rhetoric and propaganda about the North’s oppression of their way of life, sold it to the lower classes and viola, secession gained wide support. (This should sound familiar to today’s US political climate.)
There was much more to the civil war than that. It’s a complicated time that you really need the context for. A good documentary about the war is the Ken Burns one. Look it up, he does a good job of giving the issues in the country at the time. Context is necessary, but people can be made to fight any battle if you dress it up in a way that makes them want to fight for it.
Because they were conscripted to fight, for one thing, but also because they were fighting for sovereignty and independence from the Federal government which had come to outnumber them and was threatening to start overruling their internal policies.
Remember, prior to the Civil War, each State considered itself an independent nation that was just part of a military and economic alliance. They did not think of themselves as components of a national government of many states. It would be like if the U.N. imposed a global law on every member nation now, and some of them said “You don’t have that authority. We make our own laws for ourselves.”
Also because their entire economy was built on slavery, so it had a lot of importance to everyone. You can’t just destroy the economic system and expect that only rich people will suffer.
Because it wasn’t just rich mega plantation owners that owned slaves. It was perfectly common throughout the slave holding states. They saw abolition as a threat to their way of life; in any number of letters and journals as is from the rank and file, they wrote about their opposition to the idea of equality and how they were afraid if if “servile rebellion,” that freed dnd es would turn on their former owners.
Because they’re the progeny of the very authoritarian and religious Borderers that settled the South in the early 1700s and passed down the value of fealty to authority; from king to clan leader to religious leader, local wealthy plantation owner to police…basically any daddy figure.
To start with, the line isn’t as clear-cut as rich=slaveowner, non-slaveowner=poor. The average poor southerner saw themselves as comfortable and deriving benefit from the status quo ante.
“Poor” people are largely comfortable as long as they can see that someone has it worse. A racial caste system creates a moral connection in which someone can be materially poor yet mistake themselves for being in the same class as the materially wealthy. This creates a positive interest for the poorest white in the south who is treated as a citizen to rally with “his own” and ensure that the class beneath him remains there so he too has someone to look down on.
Materially, these same people see themselves as deriving a benefit from stifled competition. A suddenly free population competing freely for limited resources from the bottom would jeopardize lower-class whites ability to acquire those same resources and climb or at least maintain position on the ladder.
I’d also point out that chivalry has ingrained in our culture that the greatest empathetic value is ignoring one’s own interest to fight for the needs or rights of another. It is great to value empathy, but time and again we see that the “poor” internalize this spirit to empathize with the “plight” of the wealthy, while the wealthy consistently seek new violations of the social contract.
They were fighting what they felt was an invasion of their homeland. Even if they weren’t willing to fight for slavery they might fight to defend their family and neighbor’s. Also they might be punished if they didn’t fight
Individual motives for fighting in the war were extremely diverse and ranged from fear of governmental over reach to maintaining the “natural order”. While the issues of allowing the existence of slavery in the United States, the ability to expand slavery beyond the present area it was utilized in, and the depth and degree of legal protection slavery did/should have, were major issues in the war they were far from the only issues.
Much like how a notable portion of the US voting base believed that the economy was in poor shape a year ago, there were those who believed that the US government was being infiltrated by “racial traitors” who would work to grow the government and use its power to create a pro-black/anti-white state where non-blacks had no rights. While it’s difficult to quantify exactly how wide spread this belief actually was, its fear of government over reach found allies in large businesses entities such as plantation owners.
There were also feelings of resentment from some communities in the south, some of them ranging back to before the revolutionary war. The cliff notes version of this belief can be summarized as due to fallout from events during and following the revolutionary war left some areas economically disaffected for decades. While areas a few miles away would become major farming centers, trade and commerce hubs, and production centers. This lead to the belief that the federal government was deliberately manipulating areas for the purpose directly taking control of them to establish federal military bases.
I can go on with dozens of more individual reason but they are really more of what I’ve already talked about just with slightly different details. All in all I would say if you took all the motives for the civil war and put them in a pile, 65% of those motives would be racial/slavery based, with 30% being fear of government/fear of government being used by “them”, and the remaining 5% being other more esoteric motives such as politics, business, or specific revenge.
Do you see what’s going on with MAGA these days? They’ve got the dumbest, poorest people in the US rabidly protecting their owners. They told them the government was coming for their way of life.
For the same reason those same poor people people from Dixie fight for tax cuts for the wealthy. Rather than see themselves as working or middle class Americans, they see themselves as temporarily disadvantaged billionaires. They identify with the people who are responsible for their shitty circumstances. And that’s the basis of the Republican Party.
Propaganda is hell of a drug. The rich, even back then, promoted culture war to distract people from the fact that the existence of rich people is much more problematic than skin colour.
Keeping the blacks in “their place” ment that even the poorest white guy had something to cling to when feeling down.
same reason why poor americans vote for republicans. they are lied to and don’t have the education to critically evaluate what they are being told. why do you think the reps want to gut education funding?
Read the Articles of Secession written by the rebel states when they quit the USA. There was a pervasive fear of black people, fear that without the “institution” of slavery they’d run amuck, fear of black men victimizing white women, or white women being seduced away, or the end of the white race due to mixing. Those who profited from slavery sold these fears to the public … Not unlike how people today vote against their own self-interest out of fear of others who are different.
Comments
Because rich people manipulate
Why did people vote for Trump who aren’t going to benefit from any of his policies?
I don’t know, why do U.S. working class people overwhelmingly vote for tax cuts for the rich?
It’s because the rich and powerful are very good at propagandizing to the plebs that hurting the rich will destroy their very way of life.
Many white people were tariffed of ending slavery, because they were afraid of what the newly freed black people would do. Many of there fears were irrational. One of the more rational things they feared was them driving down wages by being willing to work for less money.
Many believed that no matter how lousy their life was, it would be worse if all those slaves were suddenly freed and allowed to roam the countryside. There is a groundbreaking movie called The Birth of a Nation (1915) that plays upon those fears. It shows how the South was deteriorating after the Civil War and was only saved by the KKK.
Slavery was one of the reasons for the Civil War, but not the only one. Economic independence (especially in relation to foreign trade) and the desire for autonomy of the southern states also played a role.
I’d be willing to go as far as stating that Lincoln’s main reason for abolishing slavery was to weaken the South economically, not some grand idea of freedom and equality for all. North simply had less to lose from it.
Taking this into account, it’s not hard to imagine that many poorer southeners would see this as fighting for freedom and independence of their states.
Simply because the rich don’t fight and die in wars. Literally a tale as old as time.
Racism. The primitive need to feel superior to others and the fear of having to give that up.
You can learn here.
The issue is, that it was not, by any means, just the rich.
The rich owned the majority, and, you can point to plantations as a great evil, easily.
Anywhere from a quarter to a third of southern families owned slaves, or, more precisely, one or more slaves. This is counted as individual owners. Men, almost exclusively. Not JUST men, but the eldest man, so, a father might be the listed owner of 10 slaves, and not his 7 sons and 3 daughters, but all of them were owners. Counted as “members of slave owning households” then, where a slave was owned by one member of the household or property, a MAJORITY owned slaves.
The issue gets weird, because you could rent them–for terms of years. So, they might be owned by a major plantation, and your family doesn’t own one, but, like a lease, you could have had one in your property or in your business, for their –or your–entire life.
Many slave owners did this to apprentice slaves out to trades, allowing them to learn blacksmithing, tannery, etc, so that they could have them come back to the planation and provide those services. Upwards of 90 percent of southern white households would have had partial or full possession of at least one slave, for part of the year.
That is partly why they fought so hard. They were, very much, active participants in the system of exploitation.
Well a post about something 160 yrs ago…and ppl can’t NOT talk about Trump, Reddit ppl can be so annoying…
The civil was about more than slavery. It was a topic but tue subject was the government telling ppl what they could and couldn’t do and ideological differences.
The south tended to be where ppl who were more isolationist. They wanted land and to live a more self sustained life and didn’t want government oversight.
The north was progressive and big city, big business, and ambitious. Think of it as country living vs big city living.
So they had very different ideological differences and there were events for a few years that lead to the attack by the south (forgot the fort name) in 1861 that started the Civil war. States wanted their own rights (slavery being one of them), and also the south didn’t want to expand the country west, Everyone fought because they felt it was the way to protect their ideology/ freedom. Wasn’t just about slavery and people who couldnt afford them fighting the riches war.
something to do with “states’ rights”
because having the class structure being based on color ensured that white people never fell to the bottom of the rung of the socioeconomic ladder. Pre-war no matter how bad of a financial situation a white person got stuck in they’d never have to do the most arduous labor, working the longest hours, as that was reserved for black slaves. Post-war white sharecroppers were working themselves to exhaustion picking cotton just as black sharecroppers were.
Tribalism.
So not much has changed.
For the same reason working class people vote against their interests today
Because there was more to it than just slavery. Slavery was by far the biggest thing but it was about states rights as a whole. The reasoning being if they take away the states right to decide whether they can own slaves, what other rights are they going to take next.
On top of that propaganda lead the common people to believe that if the slaves were freed, it would make life worse for everyone.
Slaves in the north did not want to be set free from their owners. They were treated good and like family. The south was ran with rich democrats that used money and power over them and abusing and killing them . That’s what started the war . The government uses it today to keep everyone divided so no one stands together against any tyranny. Ultimately leading us into martial law !
Same reason they do now. Propaganda and the likes
Because (to them) they were being invaded.
It didn’t matter what the reason was, a armed force was coming in to their region and it wasn’t like the expected the union to treat them kindly and sit down and have tea.
If you lived in a southern town, or really any town, and an “invading army” has declared war on your region, your first thought isn’t that they’ll be nice to you and just go on through.
It’s that they will rob, rape, pillage and plunder as they go through your place (at least that was what they thought would happen).
General Shermans army needed supplies, they weren’t limiting themselves to getting those supplies only from slave owners. What they needed, they took, from where they could get them.
The average southerner in the confederate army probably didn’t give 2 shits about the political issues or slavery or anything else. They saw it as defending their towns, their homes, their families from a foreign invading force that did not mean well for them. It’s the same reason a lot of populations fight in a war against a foreign invading force.
In their shoes, they had a legitimate fear of what could and was going to happen when the union came through and they also had no idea what would happen if the union outright won the war (we know what happened today, they had no idea what was going to happen or could happen, so they assumed the worst).
Keep in mind that the union was following a theory of “hard war”, they weren’t fighting using a theory of minimal damage or surgical tactical attacks. Heck, the union ripped up the railroads and tied them into bow ties on trees. Now imagine in that era how stories and gossip traveled and misinformation.
If you are a southerner and you see that, you probably shit yourself. Also keep in mind that in war, a lot of bad things are going to happen. Thats the nature of war. The burning of Atlanta is still referenced to this day.
So these folks thought, in their heads, they were defending themselves against a foreign invasion that was out to destroy them.
Just for some perspective, Maryland was a union state…and the union STILL invaded and occupied it (albeit this was by necessity and did make sense but its not like the folks there saw it that way. Heck the state song made negative references to Lincoln (and only changed in 2021).
The average confederate soldier didn’t think he was fighting for slavery or for the government or for the rich. He thought he was fighting to defend his own home, his own town and his own family from an invading force.
Well, the Confederacy had conscription as well. So it wasn’t all voluntary.
They were probably drafted.
Same answer as to why MAGA exists.
It’s class manipulating class.
The difference is that propaganda is much more accessible and unavoidable to the exploited class via tech.
Part of it is where the States Rights nonsense comes in. Propaganda told poor Southerners that the North was attacking their way of life after finding a way to make it sound morally superior. They said that if they accepted abolition, then the North would come for the other differences next, so the states must be able to protect the Southern way of life by maintaining their rights to maintain their own separate laws. Some people who spread this believed it and some wanted to preserve their own power and wealth. I know my extended family sent many to die for “the cause”, while only one immediate family out of many owned any slaves. Most common people believed they were fighting for everything they ever knew or loved, not for the privileges of the rich
Why are poor country people supporting Trump..
Because the south wasn’t really fighting for slavery till the Emancipation Proclamation. The war started because the south seceded and the north refused to vacate FT. Sumter.
Because they were just as racist as the rich guys
there’s a story where a southerner was asked by a northerner why they were fighting, and the southerner simply replied “because you are here” ie invading the south
that’s pretty much it
Same reason why young, working-class Americans once fought a war in support of the fascistic South Vietnam regime even though North Vietnam had absolutely no intention of ever doing harm to the US. In part because they drank the kool-aid and in part because their asses were drafted.
But actually, a poor southerner in the Civil War had much better cause to fight than anyone who went to Vietnam or Iraq, because Union troops did actually burn down their cities in the end. Are the rich slave owners chiefly to blame for it all? Yes, I think so, but there was definitely a point in the Civil War where a grunt in the Confederate Army was actually defending his home.
Because the civil war was not just about the issue of slaves
Probably close to why poor starving MAGA hat wearing idiots are supporting the same or similar causes to support the rich these days.
Old-fashioned sense of duty (similar to a lot of Northerners). Racism. The draft. Some of them didn’t. A lot of dirt-poor people of Appalachia didn’t care much for the plantation-owners and thought it was a rich man’s war. Some even went north and fought for the Union.
Likewise, while a lot of Northern soldiers were young, idealistic, even educated and anti-slavery, most of them joined the fight because the other men their age did.
For the same reason that Republicans vote over and over for the ultra rich to get even more ultra rich:
They believed the ones in charge that the ones being most subjugated were somehow at fault for their lot.
When you’re just a lowly worker and it’s the end of the day, people are killing your family friends and community members. Eventually, you gotta fight even if you’re against it all.
I don’t know, why did poor Americans fight in WWII Vietnam or Iraq?
If only corporations own Middle Eastern oil fields, why did normal Americans fight in Iraq?
The majority of slave owners in the Antebellum South only had one or two slaves. This is the reason why so many fought to maintain slavery. Their very survival depended on those extra hands. The extra large plantations did exist but they were fewer than the majority of single owner, small plot farms.
There’s something that I don’t see being mentioned, but the ability to own Slaves was seen as an aspiration. It’s the same now with designer clothes and expensive cars. In the south, the people who considered to be “The Best” among them owned slaves. Even if they only had one, owning a slave meant you were somebody.
Don’t get it wrong, a small portion of the southern white population owned slaves, bust nearly all of them wanted slaves as well.
Drafted, they did have riots that burned down draft offices and such but yeah.
The ones who worked on plantations themselves, or other slavery-dependent industries, understood which side their bread was buttered. There were plenty of loyalist Southerners otherwise, as well as plenty of Southerners who sought creative ways to shirk military service because they didn’t particularly feel attachment to the cause. The old school Southern hillbillies in the Appalachians (the poorest group of whites generally) explicitly didn’t go over to the CSA explicitly because they didn’t depend on slaves.
I would also consider how western culture saw wars. All of them were fought with muskets etc this changed once the machine gun was introduced during the civil war, so it’s very different today.
At the time every young man was excited to go fight. It was a chance to leave the farm, go on an adventure and make some real money.
The carnage from the machine changed our attitudes a bit about war before WWI now meant many would never make it home again.
I see it as political ideology + personal gain = enlistment.
I have found the most interesting sources are newspapers from the turn of century, tens snd 20 in whip they would interview older adults that children/young adults during the civil war
Excellent question! Why do they do it now?
Why do they always send the poor?
Barbarisms by Barbaras
With pointed heels
Victorious Victorias kneel
For brand new spanking deals
Marching forward, hypocritic
And hypnotic computers
You depend on our protection
Yet you feed us lies from the tablecloth
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, ooh
Everybody’s going to the party
Have a real good time
Dancin’ in the desert
Blowin’ up the sunshine
Kneeling roses disappearing
Into Moses’ dry mouth
Breaking into Fort Knox
Stealing our intentions
Hangers sitting, dripped in oil
Crying, “freedom”
Handed to obsoletion
Still you feed us lies from the tablecloth
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, ooh
Everybody’s going to the party
Have a real good time
Dancin’ in the desert
Blowing up the sunshine
Everybody’s going to the party
Have a real good time
Dancin’ in the desert
Blowin’ up the sunshine
Blast off, it’s party time
And we don’t live in a fascist nation
Blast off, it’s party time
And where the fuck are you?
Where the fuck are you?
Where the fuck are you?
Why don’t presidents fight the war?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why don’t presidents fight the war?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why do they always send the poor?
Kneeling roses disappearing
Into Moses’ dry mouth
Breaking into Fort Knox
Stealing our intentions
Hangers sitting dripped in oil
Crying, “freedom”
Handed to obsoletion
Still you feed us lies from the tablecloth
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, ooh
Everybody’s going to the party
Have a real good time
Dancin’ in the desert
Blowing up the sunshine
Everybody’s going to the party
Have a real good time
Dancin’ in the desert
Blowin’ up the sun
Where the fuck are you?
Where the fuck are you?
Why don’t presidents fight the war?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why don’t presidents fight the war?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why do they always send the poor?
They always send the poor
They always send the poor
This is an interesting question with nuance to the answer. To be clear before I give a nuanced answer, the civil war was overwhelmingly about slavery, any other reasons give, such as states rights or tariffs, go back to slavery. With that out of the way, it is helpful to compare the civil war to a modern war, since we have research data.
With the US in the Iraq war, why did the US go to war? I won’t give a definitive answer, but the majority of Americans thought on the eve of war that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had aided in 9/11. I hope that we can broadly agree that this was not true, even if the majority of Americans thought it was true.
The point I’m making is that the reason that people go to war is not the same as why leadership goes to war. There were southern low-ranking soldiers that fully believed that preserving slavery was worth fighting and dying over, even if they didn’t have slaves. There were also southerners that enlisted because they wanted an independent nation, or to defend their country, for glory, or out of a sense of duty. There are as many reasons as there were people who enlisted. The fact that soldiers enlisted for a variety of reasons can be found in every war in history, but for some reason with the US civil war there are a lot of people that try to use this fact to pretend that the war was not about slavery. The truth is that these are separate things.
Have you been paying attention to American politics recently? A whole bunch of really poor people just elected some really rich people again. Even though they have raised their taxes over and over again while giving tax breaks to really rich people. To keep it as simple as possible… rich people are really good at convincing poor people that they know what is best for them.
They probably told them that it would destroy the economy, told them that the slaves were going to take their jobs and pay, and that free uncontrolled slaves were going to ruin their way of life and culture.
Without reading anyone else’s reply, I have 2 responses. 1) Rich folk and slave owners knew it was a war for, or against, slavery, but I bet they sold it to the common folk as northern aggression, us-against-them. 2) Peer pressure (going along with the us-against-them mentality because they were afraid of how they would be perceived).
I see this evident right now in the U.S. : Rich manipulating the middle class and poor, us-against-them mentality, peer pressure not to stand up against others in the community.
Because democrats always do whay the rich racists tell them to do
Remember the entire south was democrat, most of the racists were democrats, all the states fighting to keep slaves were democrats
Sadly nothings changed
Pretty much all of history is proof that it is pretty easy for rich people to convince poor people to do things that only serve the rich people.
This is just another example.
Have you considered possibility that on both sides many people hated members of opposing political party with passion and was willing to fight not on the issue, but purely for their side and against their rivals?
Poor people have always fought the rich peoples wars
Trump was there, and he lied to them too…🙄
Same reason there were slaves in the north.
Because your initial premise is false.
It wasn’t just the super rich that owned slaves.
Many people in what we would now consider upper-middle class owned slaves.
Sure, they didn’t have plantations and dozens of acres of tobacco fields that required a labor force of enslaved people, but many families had 1 or 2 slaves.
Hard as it may be, imagine a world where slavery wasn’t morally repugnant… for what was equivalent to the price of a luxury good (car, motor home, boat, etc.) you could buy and own a person to do all of your household duties, in a time that they were much harder. You could own a small group of people who you could force to care for your property or moderately sized farm. This doesn’t even get into the even more horrific reasons people viewed owning slaves as a benefit like rape, etc.
The Southern Plantation has become the reference for slavery in America, but the reality is it was much more pervasive at an average domestic level than people realize.
So, if it was only the rich the civil war may have never happened, but since it was more broadly the political class of merchants, professionals, and mid-sized farmers, it made the process easier.
They wrapped themselves in rhetoric and propaganda about the North’s oppression of their way of life, sold it to the lower classes and viola, secession gained wide support. (This should sound familiar to today’s US political climate.)
TL:DR – it wasn’t just the rich who owned slaves.
There was much more to the civil war than that. It’s a complicated time that you really need the context for. A good documentary about the war is the Ken Burns one. Look it up, he does a good job of giving the issues in the country at the time. Context is necessary, but people can be made to fight any battle if you dress it up in a way that makes them want to fight for it.
Because they were conscripted to fight, for one thing, but also because they were fighting for sovereignty and independence from the Federal government which had come to outnumber them and was threatening to start overruling their internal policies.
Remember, prior to the Civil War, each State considered itself an independent nation that was just part of a military and economic alliance. They did not think of themselves as components of a national government of many states. It would be like if the U.N. imposed a global law on every member nation now, and some of them said “You don’t have that authority. We make our own laws for ourselves.”
Also because their entire economy was built on slavery, so it had a lot of importance to everyone. You can’t just destroy the economic system and expect that only rich people will suffer.
Because it wasn’t just rich mega plantation owners that owned slaves. It was perfectly common throughout the slave holding states. They saw abolition as a threat to their way of life; in any number of letters and journals as is from the rank and file, they wrote about their opposition to the idea of equality and how they were afraid if if “servile rebellion,” that freed dnd es would turn on their former owners.
Because they’re the progeny of the very authoritarian and religious Borderers that settled the South in the early 1700s and passed down the value of fealty to authority; from king to clan leader to religious leader, local wealthy plantation owner to police…basically any daddy figure.
To start with, the line isn’t as clear-cut as rich=slaveowner, non-slaveowner=poor. The average poor southerner saw themselves as comfortable and deriving benefit from the status quo ante.
“Poor” people are largely comfortable as long as they can see that someone has it worse. A racial caste system creates a moral connection in which someone can be materially poor yet mistake themselves for being in the same class as the materially wealthy. This creates a positive interest for the poorest white in the south who is treated as a citizen to rally with “his own” and ensure that the class beneath him remains there so he too has someone to look down on.
Materially, these same people see themselves as deriving a benefit from stifled competition. A suddenly free population competing freely for limited resources from the bottom would jeopardize lower-class whites ability to acquire those same resources and climb or at least maintain position on the ladder.
I’d also point out that chivalry has ingrained in our culture that the greatest empathetic value is ignoring one’s own interest to fight for the needs or rights of another. It is great to value empathy, but time and again we see that the “poor” internalize this spirit to empathize with the “plight” of the wealthy, while the wealthy consistently seek new violations of the social contract.
They were fighting what they felt was an invasion of their homeland. Even if they weren’t willing to fight for slavery they might fight to defend their family and neighbor’s. Also they might be punished if they didn’t fight
Why do dirt poor rednecks idolise Trump and Elon Musk?
Individual motives for fighting in the war were extremely diverse and ranged from fear of governmental over reach to maintaining the “natural order”. While the issues of allowing the existence of slavery in the United States, the ability to expand slavery beyond the present area it was utilized in, and the depth and degree of legal protection slavery did/should have, were major issues in the war they were far from the only issues.
Much like how a notable portion of the US voting base believed that the economy was in poor shape a year ago, there were those who believed that the US government was being infiltrated by “racial traitors” who would work to grow the government and use its power to create a pro-black/anti-white state where non-blacks had no rights. While it’s difficult to quantify exactly how wide spread this belief actually was, its fear of government over reach found allies in large businesses entities such as plantation owners.
There were also feelings of resentment from some communities in the south, some of them ranging back to before the revolutionary war. The cliff notes version of this belief can be summarized as due to fallout from events during and following the revolutionary war left some areas economically disaffected for decades. While areas a few miles away would become major farming centers, trade and commerce hubs, and production centers. This lead to the belief that the federal government was deliberately manipulating areas for the purpose directly taking control of them to establish federal military bases.
I can go on with dozens of more individual reason but they are really more of what I’ve already talked about just with slightly different details. All in all I would say if you took all the motives for the civil war and put them in a pile, 65% of those motives would be racial/slavery based, with 30% being fear of government/fear of government being used by “them”, and the remaining 5% being other more esoteric motives such as politics, business, or specific revenge.
Because they’d be executed if they didn’t.
Same reason people vote Republican now.
They were working to get their own slaves. You get to laze around while other people, and their children, make you rich.
Do you see what’s going on with MAGA these days? They’ve got the dumbest, poorest people in the US rabidly protecting their owners. They told them the government was coming for their way of life.
For the same reason those same poor people people from Dixie fight for tax cuts for the wealthy. Rather than see themselves as working or middle class Americans, they see themselves as temporarily disadvantaged billionaires. They identify with the people who are responsible for their shitty circumstances. And that’s the basis of the Republican Party.
70+ million people just voted for a man who made it clear his priority is billionaires, at their expense. Bootlickers always exist.
Propaganda is hell of a drug. The rich, even back then, promoted culture war to distract people from the fact that the existence of rich people is much more problematic than skin colour.
Keeping the blacks in “their place” ment that even the poorest white guy had something to cling to when feeling down.
For the same reason “normal” people worship and vote for rich assholes who don’t give a single shit about them….They’re fucking stupid.
same reason why poor americans vote for republicans. they are lied to and don’t have the education to critically evaluate what they are being told. why do you think the reps want to gut education funding?
Why do normal citizens fight in the military nowadays for a bunch of rich turds waging war?
Read the Articles of Secession written by the rebel states when they quit the USA. There was a pervasive fear of black people, fear that without the “institution” of slavery they’d run amuck, fear of black men victimizing white women, or white women being seduced away, or the end of the white race due to mixing. Those who profited from slavery sold these fears to the public … Not unlike how people today vote against their own self-interest out of fear of others who are different.
Why do they always send the poor?
Why do they always send the poor?
Why do they always send the poor?
They always send the poor
They always send the poor