Matt Walsh claims that soldiers who fought in the Civil War “did not consider themselves to be fighting over slavery on either side for the most part”
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From the January 2, 2024, edition of The Daily Wire's The Matt Walsh Show
MATT WALSH (HOST): No war that's ever been fought can be explained with a single word. It just doesn't -- the history of the world doesn't work that way. There's always more to it. Which doesn't mean we can't identify good guys and bad guys. I mean, some wars you can, some wars you can't, depending on if -- you know, we're talking about a broad subject of war here, but all I'm saying is that there has never been a war so simple that if someone asks you what caused it, you can just give them one word and that's it. And with the Civil War, there was more to it. I mean, obviously, slavery was a significant factor, but the division between the North and the South ran deeper than that. But I think more importantly, and this is the important distinction for me when it comes to the Civil War and history and the Civil War and the causes -- the motivations, rather -- really this is the most important distinction, and this is also the point that should come into play when we're talking about, you know, a statue of Robert E. Lee or something, and whether we should tear it down. And we shouldn't.
And the reason that we shouldn't is that there is a distinction to be made in every war, but especially in the Civil War, between the political macro level causes and the personal motivations of the people doing the fighting. So, in the macro, slavery was a central cause of the Civil War. It's a well established historical fact. Individually, however, the men who did the fighting did not consider themselves to be fighting over slavery on either side for the most part and especially in the beginning. The men who marched down from the North were -- as far as they were concerned, were not going to war to free the slaves. Most of them would not have taken up arms for that purpose. And the men fighting in the South were certainly not going to war, as far as they were concerned, to keep slaves, considering that almost none of them had slaves. I mean, the men who were doing the fighting -- these were poor farm boys that, like, most of them didn't have shoes. OK? They didn't have slaves. And they weren't out there bleeding and dying to protect the, you know, farmer Jim's plantation down the street and the slaves -- like, that's not what they were -- that's not what moves people to fight and to die in such desperate situations.
The men from the North thought of themselves as fighting to preserve the Union, and the men from the South thought of themselves as fighting to defend their homeland. And if you were to ask them, if you were to go back in a time machine to 1861 and go up and, you know, walk onto the battlefield -- which I wouldn't recommend -- and ask any of the Confederate soldiers why they're fighting, that's probably the answer they would give. They probably would not say, we want to keep slaves. They would say something like, I'm defending my home. This is my home. Robert E. Lee famously decided to fight for the South rather than, you know, being a commander in the North, and he made that decision not because he wanted to keep slaves, but because, from his perspective, he needed to defend his home and he considered his home to be Virginia more than, you know -- if he were to think about what's my home, it would be the state of Virginia, not the United States as a whole. That's the way he saw it. That's the way he thought of it. That's the way most people thought of it back in those days.
And what I'm talking about right now is not some, like, deep, brilliant insight. This is just the general understanding and the insight of -- that most people have understood for, you know, almost since the war was fought. And that's why most people up until recently have not had much of a problem with the statue of Robert E. Lee, the building named after him, because they were able to separate, even if they wouldn't have explained it in quite these terms, they were able to separate the macro political causes from the men themselves. And they were able to understand that this was not a, you know, cartoon being fought, this was not a cartoon. These were not, you know, cartoonish villains, these were human beings and their motivations and what drove them is far more complex than what we like to pretend today.