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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Oryan77" data-source="post: 5823765" data-attributes="member: 18701">The Civil War was about slavery, but that is not what the war was fought over. Like usual, it was fought over money and power.The thing people tend to do these days is relate "slavery" to "racism". People of the same race often enslave their own kind and that does not make them "racist". So in school, students are taught that slavery is of course bad, but it's implied that the southern states are "racist" while the northern states were not. So when you get into any kind of political debate, people ridicule the confederates as "the bad guys". It was a different time with different ways of thinking. There were no bad guys.What really irks me is how people nowadays see a confederate flag as a symbol of racism. It is not. It's a symbol of the south and nothing more.What the schools don't seem to explain to students is that yes, the Civil War was about slavery, but it was not an attempt to simply free them out of compassion. The Union was not trying to free slaves like knights on shining armor looking to help the black man. Northerners still did not see blacks as equals and they definitely were not simply going off to die so blacks would be free. The war was fought over the fact that the northern farmers who paid their laborers had a harder time competing with southern farmers who owned slaves and did not pay them. They wanted to level the playing field, which meant they wanted southern farmers to pay for labor. That meant, ending slavery. So Northerners were going off to die for profit and power.Regardless of what you see in movies, slaves were not all treated poorly by their owners. Many slaves stuck around and were hired on as paid laborers. The sad fact is most were seen as property, but that doesn't mean the "property" was not taken care of. If farmers were treating slaves poorly, then they can't work as good and if they are sick or dead, it costs the farmer more money to treat or get a new slave.I'm not trying to downplay slavery or defend it. I'm just pointing out that people get caught up in what they see in film and our text books glorify our kindness to hide our greediness. What would you rather tell school children; that we ended slavery cause we are so compassionate, or that we ended slavery so we could make more money? So our textbooks gloss over the money issue.Of course, there was still more to the war than this. But this was the gist of it if you want to look at the slavery issue.</blockquote>

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