Wish i'd brought a jay

Imagine the worst job you've ever held. The most labor intensive, with the worst boss, under the most horrid of conditions. Now imagine this job makes you work long days, up to 18 hours. Except those long days don't come with overtime, in fact they don't come with any compensation at all. In fact your only compensation is a ratty set of clothes and a sub-par housing known to breed disease. There is no upward mobility in this job, no room for advancement, in fact no ability to leave at all. If you slow down at this job you risk physical abuse if you try to leave you risk worse abuse. Now imagine that not only are you chained to this job forever, so are you're children, and their children. You are a slave. Forgotten, in the Southern perspective about the Civil War are the roughly 4 million human beings enslaved at the start of the civil war. Bought and sold like chattel. A lot of Southern apologists like to dismiss this entirely be claiming the slaves were treated well. For the sake of argument, I think that certainly some slaveowner's were better then other but they were still slaves. With no rights, no ability to get an education, no room for upward mobility in any sense. Perhaps General William Tecumseh Sherman was unduly harsh in burning Atlanta and laying waste to a large portion of the Southern Confederacy. I don't think so though. Should the states have been allowed to secede? I think there could be a strong case made for that. Should they have been allowed to continue to profit and thrive off of slave labor? Definitely not. And while it is true that maybe the North was not any kind of bastion of tolerance and acceptance that it is sometimes made out to be they were, in the end, on the right side of history. They were not fighting to defend slave labor. Another argument is that the average Confederate soldier did not own slaves, therefore slavery was not the issue. Still they were fighting for a government built upon the institution of slavery. The Southern politicians of the time were not so shy about the issue. Alexander Stephens the vice president of the Confederacy put it nicely: Our new Government is founded on exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, it cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery , subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.