Originally Posted by Mr November

The slavery element of the civil war was inflated by the north to gloss over the more legitimate details of contention for the history books. As much as I'm an advocate of equal rights and against slavery, I also think its useful to consider how common place slavery is in human history, and how easy it would be to accept if you'd grown up in a society with it. And it's especially the case with American history that has such strong ties between slavery and racism contemporarily - but these should be looked at as separate issues as well. A lot of this discussion ends up being too heavily influenced by the narrow historical context that we've all been presented growing up.