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Census of 1860 data is striking. Slave population % of the seceding states was huge, much larger than border slaves states - also, the free black population was tiny everywhere but a handful of places. Just 1.2% of the population of the free states & territories.
One of the cruel ironies of secession over slavery - and yes, secession was about slavery - is that slaveholders were themselves a small % of the population. In Virginia, 4.7% were slaveholders; 3.6% were free black Americans.
For all the size of the economic footprint of slavery, it was outside the lived experience of most Americans by 1860: <400,000 slaveholders in a nation of 31 million. And most of those held 5 or fewer slaves. Yet they drove the nation to war.
The mismatch between the small size of the slaveholding population & the vast number of people held in bondage never ceases to be shocking. Numbers don& #39;t tell the whole story, of course, but they speak volumes of their own.
Then there& #39;s this map of slavery& #39;s geographic distribution. Lincoln loved this map so much, the famous portrait of him & his Cabinet on the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation shows the map propped by a chair.
More on the mapping of freedom & slavery here: http://www.mappingthenation.com/index.php/chapter/index/4">https://www.mappingthenation.com/index.php...
The Confederacy has been commemorated for many reasons, not all of them bad. What needs to end is not all memory of gallant Southern soldiery & whatnot, but the downplaying of what the Confederate cause actually stood for. The best remedy for that is unblinking truth.
The hard truth of the Confederacy is that nearly 4 in 10 of its people lived in chains, in service of a tenth of their number, and everybody knew it.
The typical Confederate soldier fought for hearth, home, & honor, not for slavery. But he fought in slavery& #39;s cause under slavery& #39;s flag.
The sons, daughters, & grandchildren of such men sought to honor them, for human reasons anyone can understand. Those sons, daughters, & grandchildren should be judged, not for remembering, but for forgetting - & for what they did with their own times.
We, the living, have the same duty: tell the truth about the past, & do justice in the present.
