| One area that I think gets largely ignored when arguing about the causes of the war and the thought process of the soldiers is their music. How better to understand these people than to listen to their songs? In their music they spilled out there souls. The soldiers relied on music. Even Lee said that there would be no army without music. The soldier�s feelings were most often eulogized in song. Here I intend to focus on the songs as a way of understanding the soldier�s motivation. Why did they go to war? I have yet to here the song where the southern soldiers sang about how they intended to keep their slaves. Some will still argue that that is because the common soldier was fighting to protect his home, but the wealthy interests who supposedly started the conflict wanted to preserve slavery. The problem with this is that even the songs written by the people of this class hardly mention slavery. On the opposite side, there are songs written and sung by northerners that do speak of ending slavery. However, most songs sung by northerners are very derogatory when they mention blacks or slaves. I will give examples below. |