The idea that there are still parks and places named after Civil War Generals from the South

[coalition_unwilling]

60. Your heart is in the right place (I think) but you have a very poor understanding of the

root causes, and nature, of the U.S. Civil War.

To wit, the question before America in the time leading up to the civil war was NOT "does the federal government have the right to enforce the primacy of the federal bill of rights over states' restrictions about who was an American citizen and what those basic liberties were." That question had been decided by the Taney Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision, a decision with which many Northern and Western Americans of the Abolitionist stripe were unhappy, but a decision nonetheless.

The question before America in the time leading up to the civil war was this: do the people through their representative government have the power to restrict the spread of insidious forms of commerce (like human bondage)? A secondary but intricately related question to that was this: does a subsection of the people have the right to leave (or 'secede') from that Union when they are unhappy with that Union's perogatives?

Now your typical Alabama or Wisconsin farm boy may have had other motives for enlisting than the abstract questions laid out above. Having grown up on a farm myself, I can attest to the stultifying boredom of farm life and can guess that the opportunity to travel and get some excitement played a huge role in the average farm boy's decision to enlist. Add to that the question of slavery's morality or lack thereof as a motivator among a minority of the population on either side.