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That's what most of the Confederacy was fighting over. Most of the Union was only fighting over preventing secession. Evidence includes the presence of slave states in the Union, the Emancipation Proclamation explicitly excluding those states, and that quote where Lincoln literally said "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it".
It's awesome that the Civil War ended up abolishing chattel slavery in the US anyway, but that seems to have been a final "screw you" aimed at the Confederate slave states and John Wilkes Booth fans, combined with a "we really need to make sure this doesn't get out of hand again" aimed at the Union slave states, not a foreordained victory of steady principles.
That said, there were many awesome people in the Union who were in the fight specifically because of their opposition to slavery ... but admitting that, I have to admit that there were probably people in the Confederacy, and far more people in the South afterward, for whom "Southern pride" was about something other than "the right to own people". Even clearly-not-pro-Southern "The Onion", when trying to speculate about modern root motives of "The South Shall Rise Again" pride, imagined an end state that would "build us a bunch of big, fancy buildins and pave us up a whole mess of roads", not "resume slavery". We had the "General Lee" car in a movie as late as 2005. Was everyone upset because this was an obvious dog whistle from the populous pro-slavery faction of the Hollywood community? Of course not! They were just upset because the movie sucked.
Today we're well down a vicious signaling spiral, and maybe it's too late to stop or unwind that. If your favorite color is blue, and a crazy person says "but only racists like blue!", you're going to laugh and ignore them. But if that goes viral and the most sensitive half of the population decide they don't want to risk any association with racists so they disavow blue ... well, now blue-lovers really do have twice the rate of racism as the rest of the world, don't they? Maybe the 25th through 50th percentile are kind of creeped out by a real correlation, and learn to love green ... and now racism among the holdouts is 4x overrepresented and still rising! Eventually the last remaining people who admit they like blue are either unrepentant racists, stubborn fools, or confused autists. Maybe the remainder are all pathetic by this point, but the last two at least deserve more pity than disdain.
This feels like another doing it exactly backwards moment.
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Your comment made me face the truth that while I don't have objections on principle to people calling for public monuments of general Lee to be torn down and removed, the mere thought of someone vandalizing or destroying a General Lee for political reasons pierces right into my classic-American-car-respecting soul.
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