So I recently moved to a small town in Georgia where confederate flags and memorials are pretty common which got me thinking about the civil war. Obviously it was over slavery. I’m not saying it wasn’t. Rather, my question is regarding whether the issue of slavery was the primary motivation for poor whites given that only the top 20% of the population owned slaves. Were the lower class white people fed propaganda or misinformation about states’ rights and is this a possible reason that the states rights myth is still so prevalent?
Yes, they understood what the war was being fought for, and although individuals of course vary in degrees, approached in a macro sense, they certainly bought into ideas of white supremacy and the correctness of slavery, as addressed in this earlier answer.