Reply #151: You will find historians arguing it both ways...

[hlthe2b]

and certainly, the descendents of non-slave holders in the South have long pointed to their ancestors as evidence that they fought for something other than slavery. That's the thing about wars--all wars. The politicians have one set of issues and the people may have many more that they use to justify the fight. If you talk to those US soldiers and marines fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, they may have had many reasons for deciding to serve--some personal and some modeled after the official political "reasons" for going to war. In the end, though, their reasons for continuing to fight usually just boils down to their loyalty to those who fight with them. On the ground (and I am convinced this was true of many in the civil war), they believe they are fighting for their own survival and those of their neighbors. Which is why I find the urge of some to call out all who died on the side of the SOuth in the civil war as "traitors" to be extremely naive' (and expressly unwilling to try to understand history in its complexities).