The British press rightly called it a "fiscal quarrel" and they saw the “desire of the northern states for economic control of the southern states." Charles Dickens termed the North’s alleged crusade against slavery only so much “specious humbug.” Follow the money. It's always at the core of most wars.

The northern press had a significant number who expressed the sentiment to "let them go in peace" in December 1860 and early January of 1861. When the northern money-men leaned on the northern press and explained to them how the North lost and the South won economically by their independence, the northern editorial press did an about-face and called for war rather than letting the southern states leave in peace. Read the editorials of the northern press from February through April of 1861. It was about lost trade, money and tax revenues.

No other country on earth required a war to abolish slavery. America certainly didn't either. That war was “necessary” and that northern armies fought mainly to end slavery is the BIG LIE, the “saint yankee” myth. That the South fought mainly to “preserve slavery” is the flip side of that same lie. Such “comic book” mythology styled as “history” is infantile in its over-simplicity and it’s NOT supported by the historical record.

Brazil, a former Portuguese colony, abolished slavery in 1888 and did so without war. They were the last in the western hemisphere. Slavery would have ended in North America, most likely in the 19th century, without any war. Slavery would have ended here for economic reasons if not for moral ones.

Slavery continues today in parts of Africa and the Arab world. The U.S. spends more on its military than the next ten nations combined… and yet we ignore modern slavery and selectively target thugs who happen to rule over oil resources. Since America rose to super-power status after WWII and won the Cold War, America’s prudent and moral tradition of “non-interventionism” has gone by the wayside. Now few even blink when we bomb people for “humanitarian” reasons. The new Rome on the Potomac and the bloated welfare/warfare State, can trace its roots to the victory of Lincoln’s vandals in 1865.

Editorial board, perhaps if you educate yourselves, you could see that it's you who are not being honest about American history.

To add broader perspective, we must acknowledge that the African slave trade had world-wide participation from the 1440s to the 1870s. All were enslaved first by their African brothers, then they were sold to European and Arab merchants. Only about five percent or 500,000 of all African slaves transported across the Atlantic were brought to what is now the U.S.A., along the way building vast financial fortunes in New England ports like Providence, New Haven, Philadelphia and Boston. The others (some 11 to 12 million) were sold by their African brothers to traders and taken to Spanish, French, Portuguese and British holdings in the Caribbean and South America. Again, all those destinations abolished slavery without a bloody war.

For centuries, the chief export of Africa was human beings. We Americans and especially we southern Americans should have no monopoly on the guilt of allowing slavery or profiting from it. The British forced it on the American colonies in order to compete for the European tobacco and sugar markets. As the late journalist Joseph Sobran wrote, “… it’s rather comical for American blacks to sentimentalize Africa and stress that they are ‘African Americans’ while cursing the Confederate flag as a symbol of slavery. Africa has a much better claim to be such a symbol.”

We Americans were relatively minor players on the vast stage of this morality play, notable only by the destruction and death we falsely attribute to its abolition---- and our continuing lies and mythology to disguise and distort an immoral war of conquest into a moral crusade to abolish slavery .

Honest people believe that we must study true history, without omission and without exaggeration. That is all the honest Southerner really wants. Slavery is a stain on HUMAN history. Your parroting of the SAINTLY YANKEE myths do not serve the greater good of education and Truth for all.

Steve Scroggins

"But slavery was far from being the sole cause of the prolonged conflict. Neither its destruction on the one hand, nor its defence on the other, was the energizing force that held the contending armies to four years of bloody work. I apprehend that if all living Union soldiers were summoned to the witness-stand, every one of them would testify that it was the preservation of the American Union and not the destruction of Southern slavery that induced him to volunteer at the call of his country. As for the South, it is enough to say that perhaps eighty percent of her armies were neither slave-holders, nor had the remotest interest in the institution. No other proof, however, is needed than the undeniable fact that at any period of the war from its beginning to near its close the South could have saved slavery by simply laying down its arms and returning to the Union." --General John B. Gordon, from Reminiscences of the Civil War, page 19