text: Funny, none of my elder in-laws (wife's grandmother's uncle was an escaped slave in Arkansas) ever fought for the Confederacy.  Average estimate of black soldiers fighting for the Confederacy is 6,500--less than 1% of Confederate forces and, more importantly, less than 1% of black military aged males in the south.  May have been as few as 3,000.
  
  And this doesn't take into account that most were conscripted (it's not as if it can be argued they had any rights under the Confederates), and "volunteers" were frequently of the sort motivated by the desire to avoid starvation.  Military rations were better than nothing.
  
  And yes, it was about slavery.  The first blow for emancipation was also the first blow for the civil war.  It was struck by the great Christian martyr John Brown (rah'matullahi alayhi) and his followers at Harper's Ferry.