Quote Originally Posted by Azi Tohak
Everyone views the causes of the war differently, and believing that the war was about slavery is a nice salve to egos of people who think war must be fought for just reasons.
Really? I thought that was what the "noble" State Rights argument was for. To make it sound like the South was fighting for a more noble cause than preserving slavery. Would the South have seceeded for States Rights? No, it seceeded to protect slavery. The order of secession votes aligns very well with the percentage of slaves in each state...that is no accident. Nor is it an accident that slave states less dependent on slavery did not secede.

Individuals fought for their own reasons, not for or against slavery for the most part. You need to be able to separate the individual from the nation/state.

Believing it was about slavery means that you don't have to accept any part of the antebellum South as good or respectable. You can just dismiss the whole ideology and never consider that maybe the South was right in wanting freedom from what it considered a government opposed to its interests, or the encroachment of Northern interests.
One need only look at the facts and timelines to establish *why* the war started. Any society based on slavery is going to have a hard time presenting itself as "good or respectable" in modern light. That doesn't mean the people were evil, even if they adopted a practice now seen as evil. It doesn't mean they didn't have worthwhile culture. However, there is no getting around the elephant in the living room: an economy based on slavery with 30+% of household's owning slaves. To ignore this would prevent understanding of the South and what motivated it. That is why folks go grasping for "states rights" to explain secession. They want to ignore the elephant.

The South was wrong in wanting to preserve slavery above all else, and at any cost. When you look at the politics of the time the South believed that about of 1/5th of the national population should be able to dictate terms to the rest of the nation. The nation voted differently on the matter...