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The overwhelming issues which divided the north from the south in the years preceding the Civil War were about expansion of slavery into the new territories.

I forget the numbers but the vast majority of Johnny-rebs didn't own any slaves. So what did they fight for? Their rich neighbors maybe?

As for slavery in the new territories, well that was an extension of the souths fear of political estrangement from the government in Washington, as Yankee interests gained more and more power, both politically and economically. Emancipation societies were not popular in the South not because there were no southern emancipationists, but because of their association with radical abolitionism, and, a sense among southerners that it was an effected attitude by Yankees to act all morally superior. Of course the south was vary aware of the irony that the north didn't "discover" it's abolitionist sentiments until the Atlantic slave trade was closed down by the English.

In most cases I can see, the use of the Confederate ANV battle flag by Southerners (note: I'm talking about Southerners, not racists, I know the Klan likes to use the flag, but right now the state with the largest Klan activity is Michigan) do so out of pure cussedness. That is, you tell a person he can't do this, you are only gonna make him want to do it more. And from the perspective of those who have a true link with confederate heritage, (I for instance, am distantly connected to General P.G.T. Beauregard, which, given that Generals involvement with the adoption of the ANV flag by the Confederacy, gives me a particular claim to that flag as a symbol my family heritage) it is frustrating to only hear one side of the story told ad nauseam every were, with the only justification being that, even if the facts are technically wrong, it doesn't matter on account of the belief that if one has to completely soil all Southern culture in order to attack the evils of Slavery it's ok, because in the end, all southerners are racists anyway, right?

There was a Mark Fiore cartoon I saw on the MSNBC website that was quite illustrative of this hypocrisy of Yankee superiority on these grounds, on the issue of Southern heritage he just put this up

Well excuse me but that's Massachusetts heritage, not Southern.

Without slavery there would have been no civil war.

You are right about that, for the simple reason that without slavery their would have been no source of labor in the south which the northern industrialists would have had to compete with. End slavery maybe, but free em and make em equal, that probably would have come as a surprise to most Yankee troops.

You are right about that, for the simple reason that without slavery their would have been no source of labor in the south which the northern industrialists would have had to compete with.

The arguments made by modern day southern apologists would most likely surprise the Southerners and Northerners of the 1850's. The slave labor in the south was almost exclusively used to grow, harvest, and process cotton. Were it not for the cotton gin, slavery would most likely have died a slow death by the late 1830s. Except for slave trading, slavery was not a profitable enterprise. It offered no competition to northern industrailists in any way. Virtually all of a southern planter's capital was tied up in slaves and had he been willing and able to hire cheap immigrant labor he would have done better financially. The abolition of slavery would have meant ruin for most planters not because he would have to hire his labor, but because all his capital would have been confiscated from him. In truth, slavery was far more about class and caste than it was about profit. If you read some of the primary source material from the 1840s through the 1850s you will find passions peaked by the abolitionist's attempts to free the slaves, and the Southern attempts to maintain the status quo, "our peculiar institution." It is only in modern times that southerners have grasped onto this idea that there was some other passions which led to the Civil War. Abolitionists did not suddenly crop up in 1807 with the end of the African slave trade, but had been growing gradually in the north since the 1700s as state after northern state abolished slavery. If you read the Southern anti abolitionist tracts of the time you will see some of the outrageous and idiotic claims made in order to justify slavery. Southern apologists are always pointing the finger at abolitionists and their extreme rhetoric, but they fail to ever note the degeneracy of some of the writings used to defend slavery. Slavery was to sensibilities of those times what late term abortions are to modern times. Southerners can certainly be proud of their culture and their heritage, but it doesn't serve them well to pretend slavery was not a grotesque institution which the carriers of that battle flag were fighting to maintain.