re: Our University is not woke. Will remove Confederate plaques, study building names

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appreciate your thoughtful response. However, I think the poor Whites resented slavery for it made them have to compete with free labor. For them, the fight was not about slavery, but a cultural one, and one in which their homes and family were being terrorized. You are forgetting the revolts in the North against war.

By 1862, the North was losing, despite the enormous manpower advantage and had to rely on Irish and German conscripts to overpower the South. So the South started to have trouble then.

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Agree to disagree. My ancestry in the US is to the late 1600s and early 1700s when a bunch of Germanic Palantines were looking for greener pastures (at least on my father's side; my mother's family were a bunch of WOP Sicilians who snuck in through New Orleans and settled in Bham in the 1910s). The Prussian-English cohort of mine settled mostly in PA before making their way into the Carolinas heading into the American Revolution. Then, they worked their way west into Tennessee and resided in Winston, CO Alabama by the mid-1800s. Just a bunch of traveling church builders (if you ever run across a Pleasant Grove or Pleasant Grove Church in that tract, it was likely the same group). They weren't very creative.

That said, they weren't wealthy nor owned huge tracts of land or slaves. Although, I'd imagine they held the sentiment I mentioned previously. It is an oddity that their pro-Union ties led to Winston Co being the only CO not to vote to secede from the Union from Alabama. To borrow from a documented quote of my Grandfather Preacher, he "just can't see fighting against the flag that George Washington fought for"

Almost to the man they opted to go into hiding and sit it out or they joined the 1st Alabama Cavalry and fought for the North. Interesting history reading some of their first hand accounts of the time, after their term of service they were screwed coming and going back home. A Union Patrol would come through and take what they wanted and distrust all as traitors and Rebel insurgents. A Southern patrol would come through and treat them as traitors or cowards, and attempt to force conscription. A lose-lose all around.

That said, I have no aspirations that they were against slavery or thought themselves equal to blacks. In fact, I'd bet they fell squarely in the camp of being a afraid a well educated house slave may be freed and automatically be considered by some as superior to them due to intellect alone. However, it was a sense of patriotism for the Union that wedged them between both sides.

That was more common across the South than is typically mentioned in the macro look at the war aims and societal thought. The same wasn't greatly different in the North.

To your point, the North was growing weary of the war by 1862. They were not this loving, tolerant, non-racist group of white Americans. They were simply (and still are to a large degree) more racially and ethnically seperated to ease cultural tensions and clashes.
That is largely why integration was such a major culture shock in the south. The north was seperated just as much as the south, but had established support structures (schools, shopping, employment, and restaurants) that allowed for "integration" without truly having to integrate much of anything. That wasn't the case in the rural areas or across the South.

So, in 1862, there was indeed a lot of pressure on Lincoln to end the war. But, that pressure was economical. First term enlistments were coming up and they wanted to avoid conscription. Further, the influx of runaway slaves into the North brought its own issues as it upset the balance of society that I mentioned (worsened in the North after the 1863 EmancipationProclamation, as FREE MEN were moving North and settling. Moreover, everything west of the Appalachians mainly depended on the Mississippi River to get goods to foreign markets and the Eastern seaboard. And, those key Union states were growing weary of the lost revenue. So, morale was running low and patience thin in the North. This was worsened by the Union draft riots (that were really race riots) early in 1863 - I believe March 1863 was the first Union conscription, not 1862 as you mentioned, but could be wrong. Either way, by late 1862, Lincoln needed a win. He opened 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation and had already committed Grant to open the Mississippi River.

Hence, Vicksburg became the key that Lincoln wanted to put in his pocket. There was significant fear that those western states would abandon the war effort if the river didn't open soon. There was also a fallacious thought that Vicksburg would stop reinforcements of food and men from west of the MS and cripple the south. The latter was not a major impact on the southern war effort, but the former was instrumental.

Well, God smiled on the Union and the fall of Vicksburg (opening of the Mississippi River) and massive victory at Gettysburg happened within days of each other and changed the tide of the war. It restarted Union support for the cause and the South was on borrowed time going forward.

While most of this is really digressing from the main point, as interesting as I find it personally, the war was still started over the future of slavery and political powers structures affected by them.

Interestingly (or maybe not), I'd hypothesize that without the Civil War, and had slavery ended on its own natural course, which was certain to happen, the racial issues in the country today would be much better to nonexistent. Forcing such a societal change of established norms of more than 250 years in the Americas, followed by the reconstruction era, and on into and through the 1900s, the pride of the southern white male and its aristocratic elite were wounded. It drew out the real hate against the black man and woman that pervaded through the South for so long, as they lashed out against what they attibuted as the cause for their demise in standing and stature.