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So? Do you think that means slavery was all good? They stayed because they had no other life to go to. Jesus... and dey buhleeved dat shidtSo they chose to fight with the Democrats....Interesting.16th South Carolina Volunteer Infantry which was recruited from Greenville county and black Confederate soldiers. Over 65,000 black Confederates served in uniform during the War for Southern Independence. Notice the picture with both white and blacks sitting at the same table during this vet reunion photo.
At the time, it was more about State's rights, and fighting off an invasion that affected their way of life.
well, then they would have deserved being forced back into the fields.
Sherman and the likes were killing ALL, even the negroes. Also the blacks were not gonna sit idly by and watch the homes they lived in get burnt down. Or their food taken or burned. They needed to survive too.
Maybe some freed slaves who owned property, eh.
A lot of slaves, if they wasnt free and fought, stayed behind, and watched over their masters land and family.
I think the antebellum South was slavery for poor Whites too - which were over 90% of the South's White population at that time. The slave owners used that system to keep them poor. So that Old South must have been like a feudal society with the Rhett Butlers/Scarlets O'Hara living in Mansions while the poor White masses toiled away for them. Many poor Whites did not own land but we're sharecroppers. That was a similar arrangement to Medieval Europe of Lords and the serfs.
Yes, there was definitely indentured servitude. At least for some of them, there was a light at the end of the tunnel if they worked themselves half to death.
I think if the poor Southern Whites weren't sharecropper serfs, many of them were in prisons as a number of those states were penal colonies before American independence. So I think there may have been truth that most Southern Whites weren't actually fighting for the maintenance of slavery but just to keep food on the table. The slave owners tho appeared to be fighting to maintain the institution of slavery
Actually Joe, the wealthy slave owners were exempt from fighting. If there was more than 15 (I think?) slaves on a plantation, they didnt have to fight. There was a lot of blacks that owned slaves too, more than 100 at a time.
Only the wealthy owned them. Very few. So yes, the majority were fighting for their homes, families, food, etc.