As an example (we run into stuff like this. All. The. Time.) I recently ran across somebody's personal website, The Civil War in Georgia, created in 1996 and last updated in 2000. It's an amateur site -- both in design and writing (and the Internet has come a long way since then). It's just an illustration of the dismal ignorance rampant out there today.
The site deals with several subjects related to the war in Georgia --the cause, the blockade, Sherman's march, etc. It sez the war ...was America's defining moment, when the rural collection "These United States" transformed into the industrial powerhouse of "The United States." (If one is old enough to remember, one might call it the military-industrial powerhouse bully.... but I digress.)
What caught my attention, though, was in the "causes" section: "Slavery caused the war. It was the desire of the South to keep humans enslaved for profit and the inability of the North to stomach the evil of slavery that led so many thousands to their deaths."
The inability of the north to stomach slavery? Really? Actually, he's partly right. The north was unable to stomach those parts of the slavery enterprise that were no longer profitable for them -- the financial responsibilities of round-the-clock, cradle-to-grave support of slaves who did not, could not, produce round-the-clock, cradle-to-grave.
However, when they were relieved of that responsibility, and it rested solely with plantation-owners in the South to support their slaves, the north was all too happy to get rich off the products of the evils of slavery -- that is, weaving slave-grown cotton in their textile mills (i.e., the infant "industrial powerhouse" ran on "remote" slavery) and the shipping of slave-grown cotton in the cargo holds of their ships headed for England.
As long as they didn't have to come in close proximity to slaves, Northerners were fine with the "evil of slavery" -- particularly when they profited so handsomely off the work of slaves who were out of sight, out of mind.
I have said it before, and I will continue to say it. Whatever "sins" the Confederacy committed, the Union's were just as bad, and some of them worse -- and continue to be so to this day.
Connie my father and I were talking about this the other day and he said that when slaves were brought to America from Africa they died because they couldn't adapt to the cold temperatures up north so they didn't import them like they were used in the south. Later, they would have been aclimatised but slavery never caught on up north. Northerners hated black people and didn't want them living up there.
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