Orlando Sentinel columnist Charley Reese has gone so far as to assert that the Confederacy was fighting for liberty. All of these beliefs are based on misreadings of history, and, taken together, they have the reality exactly backward. The Civil War was not fought to end slavery; it was fought to defend slavery. The confusion stems from the failure to realize that the two sides in a war need not be fighting over the same issue. The objective of the North was not to end slavery but to preserve the Union. What the South sought was not to end the Union but to preserve slavery.