In which Recursion rants about the "confederate flag"

[Aristus]

8. I'm not dehumanizing them.

Which is not to say they weren't despicable human beings.

Fighting for home and hearth is nonsense. Nobody wanted to take their home and hearth away. No one was threatening their precious "heritage". They were fighting for slavery. And the slave-owners who stood to gain the most from the blood sacrifice of backwoods illiterates used every trick in the book to convince the troops that they were fighting for anything other than slavery. "States Rights", anybody?

And it's worth pointing out, I think, that the poor non-slave-owners wanted to preserve slavery just as much as the rich planters. As long as slavery existed, the impoverished dirt farmers who did the bulk of the fighting would not be on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder.