Lvt430 (as an aside, please do take the time to sign your name--there is
something undignified and deameaning in referring to you as a number) asks
the quite cogent question "what is this thread about?"

The question of why the Civil War was fought is complex in part because it
begs a set of deeper questions.  If we mean by it "why were soldiers
willing to put their lives at risk?" I think we will get a rather different
answer than if we ask "why did the politicians choose to take their
societies to war?"

It seems to me that the political meaning of the war is the more important
question.  I don't mean to diminish the patriotism of the men (and a few
women) in both sets of armies who choose to fight.  But their choices were
already conditioned by the larger political choices of their polities.
And, as numerous military historians have pointed out, from Victor Hanson
to J. Keegan to S. Ambrose, the reasons why soldiers risk death to fight do
not necessarily correlate to the politics which created the war in the
first place.

So at best, the question of why soldiers fight only takes us a short
distance in assessing the larger meaning of the war.  If we want to know
what the Civil War was "about," we will have to look at the politics which
created it and sustained it.  The choices of the soldiers, while appealing,
are only a piece of this larger question, and (if Ambrose and Keegan and
Hanson are correct) perhaps not even a very important piece.

As Professor Gutzman noted some days ago, even that question is complex,
since politicians speak in different forums and for different
audiences--what they say in one context, for one audience, may be quite
different from what they say in other, contexts and for other audiences.

However, I don't think I am guilty of heinous liberal historical revionism
by claiming that the political conversation within which and by which the
decision to launch the war was made was thoroughly implicated in a larger
conversation about slavery.  In that sense, it seems entirely reasonable
and correct, based on the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence, to
say that the war was about slavery.

Warm regards,
Kevin

--On Monday, February 24, 2003 7:00 PM +0000 [log in to unmask] wrote:

> Most text books in the 50's and 60's stated that the CW was fought to free
> the slaves or the one I had did. That's a post war idea.....most Union
> soldiers enlisted (forgetting the local ties and the rush for the
> adventure and pere pressure) not to free the slave but to save the union.
>
>  I'm trying to remember how the thread got started....wasn't it on why
>  they fought?  In the beginning it wasn't to free the slaves for the
> northern soldiers ...the same as it wasn't to keep the slaves....at the
> start of the war the common northern soldier fought because his friend
> went or he had a belief in keeping the Union whole not the free the
> slaves.....Southern fought for the same reasons because his friends went
> off to war or he felt he had to defend his state.  Yes, I'm sure there
> were parties in the North that went of the war to free the slave just as
> there were most likely Southerners who fought to keep their way of life,
> which included slaves......
>
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--
Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of History, MSC 2001
James Madison University
Harrisonburg VA 22807
Phone:  540/568-6306
Email:  [log in to unmask]

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