SOURCE betrays Hip-Hop, diasporan Africans, teams up with U.S. Army

Yes, yes it does...it tells you I've got other shite to do, fish-man!

When you submit the following to Alex goat-boy:

"At first for Northerners it was about preserving the Union, but after the Proclamation the war was about slavery for them aswell,"

That was, in part, my argument. I think we simply disagree about the timeframe. The Proclamation was issued in the fall of 1862, and went into effect on 1 January 1863. By that time, and by your logic, the following:

- Fort Sumpter
- First battle of Bull Run/Manassas
- Battle of Ball’s Bluff
- Federal Naval force capture of Port Royal
- Grant hit-and-run attack on Belmont, Missouri
- Battle of Mill Springs, Kentucky
- Taking of Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee
- Battle/Fall of Nashville to Union
- Battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas
- Battles of Hampton Roads
- Capture of Island #10 in Mississippi
- Peninsula and Jackson Valley Campaigns
- Battle of Shiloh
- Battle of Peralta, N.M (stops Confeds from invading CA, unlike this last invasion...I mean, uh, recall election)
- Battle of Seven Pines
- Seven Days’ battles: Mechanicsville, Gaines Mill, Malvern Hill

and many other engagements were for...what, exactly? Toward...what...end...exactly?

Strangely enough, we may be, in this particular case, talking past each other, in that we are no longer used to really hearing each other.

But the reality is that slavery is one of many causes, and effect-causes, of the Civil War. You wouldn't deny the truth that while northern industrial opportunity attracted scores of immigrants from Europe, in search of freedom, the South's population stagnated, would you?

Indeed, even as slave states were added to the Union to balance the number of free ones, the South found that its representatives in the House had been overwhelmed by the North’s explosive growth. More and more emphasis was now placed on maintaining parity in the Senate. Failing this, the paranoid theory went, the South would find itself at the mercy of a government in which it no longer had an effective voice.

What is about slavery, or was it about sectionalist survivalism? Let's take a look.

Jefferson Davis, at the time a Senator from Mississippi, summed up the sectionalist argument himself. Speaking, in effect, to the people of the North concerning slavery, “It is not humanity that influences you… it is that you may have a majority in the Congress of the United States and convert the Government into an engine of Northern aggrandizement… you want by an unjust system of legislation to promote the industry of the United States at the expense of the people of the South.” There, in plain English, is the shrill, accusatory language of sectionalism.

The Civil War, as much as it was about slavery, it was also - IMHO mostly - about power, infulence, authority and , of course, money, which is, IMHO, what all modern armed conflict is about.

To reduce the Civil War to monocausality (particularly moral monocausality) is, in my opinion, to fail to really look at it.