“…their initial motivations to go to fight in a desire to preserve a world based on racial privilege in which slavery plays the central role in structuring their society, whether it be socially, intellectually, religiously. So there’s no question that the Lost Cause view of slavery is essentially benign, if not positive. It’s absolutely wrong and doesn’t bear any relationship to the way in which these men themselves of course saw slavery as fundamental. Slavery had been a long-established right in the United States and they don’t feel as though they’re unjustified in trying to defend it. They were quite frank about that.”

I think that reading: Plain Folk’s Fight…The Civil War & Reconstruction in the Piney Woods Georgia (by Mark V. Wetherington), explains a lot about how the subject of slavery fit into the social mindset of many folk in 1860-1865. The Speechifiers, newspapers, and the Pulpit, all had a big influence in convincing folk a change was needed, and the slavery issue was used heavily!

Kevin Dally

One man’s opinion:

"The highest ambition of all men in the south at that time, so far as occupation was concerned, was to be a planter, and to spend the most if not all his time on his plantation. For this, the merchant invested his profits, the lawyer his earnings, and indeed everybody saved all he could to attain to this ideal life. The planter living upon his own lands, surrounded by his slaves, a happy and childlike race in that day, dispensed a broad and generous hospitality; no one was ever turned from his door. For even the lowliest a place was found. His neighbors were everybody within a day's ride from his home, and frequent visits were made, the planter mounted on his splendid saddle horse, his favorite mode of travel, and his wife and children in the carriage. He was a proud man, proud of his wife and children, proud of his plantation and slaves, proud of his stainless honor, and ready to exact or give satisfaction for wrongs fancied or real, suffered or done, not by the deadly pistol concealed in the hip pocket, but by a meeting upon the field of honor, with mutual friends to see fair play. These were the halcyon days of the south, gone never to return, but the stories of those days, the sacred traditions, have preserved, and will, I hope, continue to preserve the same spirit in the descendants of those noble men, and keep them pure in race and upright and honorable. In this lies the hope of the south to-day. But what pen can do justice to southern society as it was before the war, its wide influence for good all over the land; mine cannot. I speak of a class and not of individuals, for there were rare exceptions who were coarse and rude, as there are to-day men who, forgetting the traditions of the past, destitute of gratitude and honor, flaunt themselves in high places, scheming only how best they may deceive the credulous and achieve their ends."
Frank Alexander Montgomery
http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/montgomery/frontis.html