re: #73 ralphieboy

Slavery was without a doubt a key issue.

Neither you nor I were in the American south when people were called on to decide whether to fight to support the confederacy or the union and I am glad that we never had to make any such choice.

Not during the 1860s, to be sure.

However, I did live there in the 1960s-1990s, in a very conservative area of Louisiana, and the “Dixie” mentality was a prevalent part of the culture there.
One thing that I remember from our state History classes we were required to take to graduate from high school was that there was a *LOT* of coverage of the Civil War years - and it was written extrememly sympathetically toward the Confederate cause - up to the point of actually supporting slavery. United States History classes weren’t much different.