Krasny-Volny wrote:Ifreann wrote:The Confederates weren't an army fighting for independence though. They were fighting for slavery. Not just to keep slavery for themselves, but to expand it to all new states, and to South America, and to force it on the Northern states.
Perhaps that can be said of the Confederate army at the very beginning of the civil war, but I understand that by late 1863 the primary reason for enlistment by most was the threat of occupation by the federal troops. You see this trend emerging everywhere from Texas to Georgia to Virginia and the Carolinas. They perceived it as resisting an almost foreign invasion that would've resulted in pillage and destruction.
Funny how the perception of an invasion tends to unite people, and inspire patriotism in the inane.
While there can be no doubt many young men ran off to war because they wished to defend slavery, or simply out of peer pressure, it's an altogether different ball game when you're a local soldier who thinks he's defending his home, whatever flag said home falls under. And that's not even counting the Native Americans who fought for the South, or the convicts that were trying to earn their freedom, or the conscripts who were more or less press ganged to join by the home guard and included old men, widowers with children, adolescents barely old enough to know what they were doing, and foreign immigrants including European Jews, who themselves faced a degree of social discrimination in the 1860s South.
Throughout history people have gone into the army for a variety of reasons. It's erroneous to suggest the Confederate hivemind bled and died out of some universal motivation to maintain slavery and nothing else.
Only 7% of Germans were Nazis. Later in the war, a lot of the Wermacht wasn't fighting to spread the Holocaust, just to make sure Germany survived.
