>>I will never understand how people to this day can still
>say
>>stuff like that.
>
>Folks like to be in denial. In high school, the history
>teacher told his classes that slavery was a "necessary
>evil...now let's move on" and one of my friends stood up and
>hit him on the head.
Who the hell is in denial? I didn't say it was a necessary evil. I didn't say anything close to that. I said that the Southern secession and the Civil War was not about slavery, which it wasn't. The North didn't care about freeing a ton of slaves, because it wasn't illegal until the middle of the civil war. There were plenty of Northerners that owned slaves, so if slavery was the issue of secession, the south never would've been against it.
The secession was due to a fundamental difference in where the country was headed economically. The South wanted to protect it's agricultural based economy, and the states were being overpowered by the federal government, which led to the secession. I doubt if any of those congressional meetings dealt with the issue of slavery and how morally reprehensible it was.

So for the record, I'm not in denial. I just know that slavery wasn't the reason for the secession, because that wasn't the primary issue for either the North or the South.