"The Outlaw Josey Wales" was a little too late to have an effect on recruitment. Good movie though, lousy way to learn history, movies are. I think very few of the actual combatants in any war know the "official" reason they are being shot at. The landowners in the south caused a lot of boys to die. In the north a vocal minority, religiously oriented group of abolitionists caused many a young lad to suffer the same fate.
We were not discussing why soldiers fought(If you could ask 50 soldiers you probably would have heard 50 dissimilar answers), when the thread was highjacked, we had morphed into the causes of the "Late Unpleasantness" (one quaint southern epithet for the war). Sable hit on another. It was a civil war but, I have no idea when the words term grew caps and became "The Civil War" or "The American Civil War." I've heard and read "War of the Rebellion" (Southern and Northern usage) but, it was the official term used by the Federal Government when the Official Records were published.
sable: You are correct in your assessment of the causes but, slavery was the underlying element driving the conflict. The plantation owners wanted slavery and "states rights' was supposed to protect that part of the economy. The abolitionists just wanted the practice stopped. The sooner the better. Many causes can be pointed out. Slavery was the thread that tied everything together and was the cause of the disagreement. A small population in each segment of the country, one condemning slavery, the other striving mightily to preserve it took the country into a war that really took the country to the next level after the separation from England.
