Reply #17: According to Bruce Catton,

[Frances]

the working men in the North fought because they thought it was in their best interests. There had been compromises in the past that allowed slavery to be legal in the old South, but the South wanted to expand slavery into the territories that were becoming states. What we would call blue-collar workers in the non-slave states knew that expanding slavery would make it much, much harder for them to prosper because they would have to compete with workers who received no wages at all.

The working man of the non-slave states hoped to get ahead in the world by his own efforts. And the larger and more powerful the country he was living in, the more likely it was that the average person would be able to move up the economic and social ladder by his own efforts.

White Southern working class people fought because, even though they were assigned their position in the social scale at birth, they were guaranteed a place on the social ladder that was above that of the slaves, so they would never be on the bottom of the ladder.