Quote:
Originally Posted by freebeard
Only 10% of Southerners held slaves. The other 90% experienced a war of Northern aggression.
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In Georgia in 1860, over 43% of the population were slaves. Your 10% slaveowners and 90% war victims math apparently doesn't consider blacks to be people.
Under 600,000 white Georgians seceded to keep over 460,000 black Georgian slaves. That's a pretty aggressive act on its own. The number of southern white victims of the civil war is quite small- was a prosperous merchant who sold luxury goods to plantation owners an innocent victim of the war or an accomplice and a profiteer? You didn't have to own a single slave to have your fortune depend on slavery.
Read Georgia's declaration of secession. It's pretty representative of the other states' declarations, a tiringly long list of grievances about the fact that people who don't live Georgia refuse to enforce white Georgians' right to own people. While refusing to admit any problems with slavery or acknowledge that they have for decades been forcing slavery on the whole country, they whine that free states have stopped obeying federal rules requiring them to actively cooperate in enforcing slavery. At the end, in order to "seek new safeguards for our liberty, equality, security and tranquility", they secede. For the
liberty to keep 43% of their population in the
equality and tranquility of slavery.