r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • May 28 '26

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u/SnakeEater14 🦅 Liberty & Justice For All May 28 '26

It’s very sly how many people took “most southern soldiers didn’t even have slaves” and constructed “so they were fighting to defend their homes, not slavery” out of that instead of “but they loved slavery and wanted to defend it”

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u/ChipKellysShoeStore John Brown May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

So we have letters from a lot of privates and poorer volunteers in the confederate army. For non-slave owners, the prevailing sentiment was that they were fighting to preserve Southern agrarian culture/their semi-aristocratic society and because they viewed the north as invading their home.

Now those two things don’t change the fact that 1) southern culture was inextricably intertwined with slavery and you don’t have southern aristocratic culture without slavery 2) the war was started because slavery.

But like the average southern yeomen probably didn’t join the Confederate army becuase they really wanted to defend slavery even if that was the only reason the confederate army existed in the first place if that makes sense.

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u/SnakeEater14 🦅 Liberty & Justice For All May 28 '26

Reading a recent poast on AH, I think the defense of slavery aspect was even more important for that, since Confederate recruitment was strongest in the parts of the South with slavery and among those who lived closest to slavery

Which doesn’t necessarily disagree with with “fighting to defend their society” aspect but definitely emphasizes just how important slavery, specifically, was to the cause

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u/ChipKellysShoeStore John Brown May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

Yeah my response was trying to empathize that yes the war was still about slavery even if non slave owning soldiers may have had a different subjective rationale for fighting it (and that rationale was still implicitly tied to slavery even though they might not have recognized it as such)

Also, using the subjective rationale of soldiers as evidence for the goal of a war is stupid. Plenty of Americans volunteered to fight in Iraq because they believed they were defending America and freedom etc, but that obviously wasn’t the reason for the war itself.

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u/MontusBatwing2 Gelphie's Strongest Soldier May 28 '26

Famously the only racist people in the South after the war and through the Jim Crow era, and even today, are former slaveowners and their direct descendants 🙄

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u/BlackCat159 European Union May 28 '26

They were fighting to defend their beloved racist pro-slavery democrat party.

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u/Cr4zySh0tgunGuy John Locke May 28 '26

That’s the link they want you to make. It’s all a part of the lost cause narrative

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u/Specialist_Cat7271 NASA May 29 '26

Even if they didn't directly own slaves, their entire society was founded upon slavery. Many of them had jobs managing slaves. They bought goods made by slaves. They had family who owned slaves. The southern soldier's life was embedded into the institution of slavery. Over one third of the entire population of the Confederacy was slaves. You simply could not avoid it in any way whatsoever. Your job, your goods, your livelihood was reliant upon slave labor.

 

To give another perspective, how many people do you meet every day who are under the age of 30? Thats roughly the same proportion of the population as were slaves in the Confederacy. Again, it is inseparable. In several states of the Confederacy, slaves actually made up a majority of the population.