Despite our best attempts to generalize about the motives of millins of people, they refuse to fit into our one size fits all views of history. So, as an antidote, I will generalize about the Civil War, too. THe difference is I will try to do it with with slightly smaller groups. I may not have a lot of luck though. Tolstoi spent a thousand pages exploring such themes in War and Peace and I don't think the answers are clear there, either.

As I understand it, the war was about different things to different people depending on our socio-economic and geographic position.

For large numbers of people, it was about states rights and there were important issues at stake. For others, it was about slavery. There were people who were risking their health, fortune and lives out of a sincere belief that slavery was evil well over a generation before the war began.

Tens of thousands of other young men from the North went off to fight in what they saw as a romantic crusade. Tens of thousands of other young men fought to keep an invader out of their homeland. And yet another group, emotional and cultural descendants of the Cavaliers, took arms against the industrial, grimy, mercantile society to the North

Sourdough