What made the Southern Confederate cause in the Civil War unlike the Patriot cause in the American Revolution?

Answer 1

The difference could be said to be that the south lost the Civil War and the winners write the history.

When you look at the simple answer that the patriots were against unfair taxes...well, British citizens in England were taxed more heavily and looked on us as a bunch of whiners according to some histories.

And the Civil War didn't become about freeing slave until years into it. Before that it was more about spreading slavery and how individual states should have the right to make big decisions like that. A cynical view would say that the reason for the Emancipation Proclamation was as much about keeping the countries of Europe from supplying the south as it was about the rights of all people to be free.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad both wars turned out the way they did but part of that I'm looking at them from the winner's side both times.

Answer 2

The American Revolution was an effort to remove an imperialist power who was siphoning off wealth from here and transferring it to England.

The Civil War was a dispute within the U.S. over political decisions among our own competing capitalists.

The key to understanding the Civil War comes from looking at the tarrif acts in the years leading up to the Civil War that illustrated the conflict that existed between the manufacturing-based North and the plantation-farming industry of the South. The slavery issue was used as a way for these competing interests to forward their own agenda.

Answer 3

The Patriot cause in the Revolutionary war was to get freedom from the King.

The Southern side of the Civil war was to ensure NO FREEDOM for the slaves and to break up the Union.

Answer 4

One obvious difference is the enslavement of a race of people. The Revolutionary War was about Independence from a usurping foreign authority, that was taxing the colonies and imposing it's will upon them with little or no regard for the well being of the colonists. The Civil War was about states rights, slavery, and a clash between agrarian and industrial economies.