As I was researching some family history I found some Confederate soldiers in my lineage. It occured to me what were these average men fighting for? By average I mean subsistence farmers, in other words they had to grow everything they ate or make everything they used. These men whose lives were occupied with keeping food on the table and clothing on their backs, what interest did they have in rich plantation owners?
The answer I believe is none!
Why should they risk life and limb for a corporate business man that they had no interest in or stand to benefit from in any way shape or form?
Most were too busy to keep up with politics, and they did not have access to the media as we do today.
The overwhelming reason to me seems to be that the Union Army was fighting its way through the South and destroying everything in its path. The only choice these men had to save their families and their farms was to join the Confederate Army.
Whether they believed in slavery or not does not seem to be an issue that comes up in the letters of Confederate soldiers I have read. I believe they were fighting a government that they beleived had overstepped it's bounds as laid out in the Constitution, and an opposing army that was determined to destroy them.
Now let me be perfectly clear on something. No one in his right mind would say it is right for one man to enslave another!
The atrocities committed during slavery are horrific and some of the worst crimes ever committed against humanity! The white people of this time seem to have had the same mindset as the Nazis did to the Jews or the abortionist to unborn children. They were not acknowledged as human beings.
Therefore they were denied human rights.
But I want to focus on the average Confederate soldier.
It seems to me that the above-mentioned reasons are the only ones they would with risk their lives over. Why else would they do this?
From what I have learned watching Antiques Roadshow, when they are talking about Confederate Army memorabilia, it is always of much poorer quality than what the Union soldiers had. Also in one Confederate soldiers letter I read said they had a sit-down strike because they were not paid or fed. Which leads me to believe they were fighting for family and the Constitution.
A man may believe strongly in many issues, but very few he is willing to lay his life down for!
