Army secretary open to renaming military bases named for Confederate generals

PO3 Jason M. - The history is a bit more complex than that. The only reason why they were fighting for their homes in the first place was because the officials they elected decided to secede from the Union. The reason for that succession is well known, the contemporary declarations of secession make it quite clear that the reason was for the preservation of slavery. This wasn't some secret from the rank and file.

So yes, they were protecting their homes, but the reason they needed to do that was because by and large they signed on to attempt a rebellion to preserve slavery. If we claim, "well it was complicated", for those German soldiers, the same is true of the Confederate rank and file.

PO3 Jason M. - You're using special pleading. You're saying that the poor southerners were totally innocent of the war their leadership got them into and joined to protect their homes after the fact. But the Germans somehow were by and large complicit even though once their leadership similarly got them into a war and they were thinking they were ultimately protecting their homes too.

PO3 Jason M. - You stated:
"I highly doubt that there are too many Confederate diary entries out there where men are stating how they are going to fight for the institution of slavery."

This is actually a very incorrect and you are also wrong that they were largely uneducated. The interesting thing about the Civil War is that it was the first war with a highly literate rank and file on both sides. What makes this interesting is in that period the soldiers wrote and they wrote a lot. Much of this still survives so we don't really have to guess as to their motivations here either.

Even the idea that they were just fighting for their homes is extremely simplistic, they were by and large very politically opinionated. A good book to read is, "For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War" written by James M. McPherson.

https://www.amazon.com/Cause-Comrades-Why-Fought-Civil-ebook-dp-B000SH5ZOG/dp/B000SH5ZOG/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=

PO3 Jason M. - It's quite good. It does point out that some people are more likely to have surviving letters. Mostly people who joined early in the war, the richer families more than poorer (just due to them being more likely to keep such items).

Even on the Northern side things were more complicated. For a long time I had always thought that most of the soldiers on the north were not about abolishing slavery but about preserving the Union. As it turns out a surprising number of them actually did hold very strong anti-slavery abolitionist views and that motivated their service.