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>I don't think the South loved owning slaves as much as they found it an expedient economic model

The economic model is strong in some ways; the value of all the slaves in the south, as I understand it, was greater than the value of all the farmland in the south.

There are weaknesses in the economic model, too, though. Nobody is saying that the southern enlisted man was hesitant to fight, and few of the enlisted (as opposed to officers) owned slaves.

For that matter, your average enlisted southerner would probably have been significantly better off, economically speaking, without slavery, just because if you are trying to sell your own labor, it's significantly more difficult to do so when you are competing with literal slaves.

So while you can use the economic model to explain the behavior of the southern elite, the economic model does not explain why the average southerner fought.