A common apologetic for the Confederacy is that the large majority of soldiers on the Confederate side had not owned slaves, and that they had only fought to protect their homeland from invasion by a hostile army.
However, many Confederate soldiers had been sons of slaveowners, employees of slaveowners, etc. Such association with slaveowners was more common among soldiers than among the general population of the Confederate states. More broadly, many non-slaveowners perceived that they had a stake in the continuation of slavery, and they defended it as if they themselves had owned slaves.
“Ninety-eight percent of Texas Confederate soldiers never owned a slave.” | Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog
Non-Slaveholders’ Stake in Defending the “Peculiar Institution” | Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog
Selected Statistics
What | States | Seceded? | # Slaves | Slave. Frac. | Owning Frac. |
Lower South | SC, GA, AL, MS, LA, TX, FL | Before Ft. Sumter attack | 2,312,352 | 47% | 36.7% |
Upper South | VA, NC, TN, AR | After Ft. Sumter attack | 1,208,758 | 29% | 25.3% |
Border States | DE, MD, KY, MO | Neutral or in the Union | 432,586 | 13% | 15.9% |
The slave fraction is for the total population.
The owning fraction is for white families.
Notice the correlation between amount of slavery and support for the Confederacy. This extended to which people tried to secede from slave states -- those who owned hardly any slaves. Western Virginians succeeded but eastern Tennesseeans failed.
The Confederacy's politicians had made a big issue out of protection of slavery. They had earlier tried to have at least some new states be slave states, they wrote slavery protection into their Constitution, and they objected to northern states' interfering with the catching of runaway slaves.
Avalon Project - Confederate States of America : Documents, especially
Avalon Project - Confederate States of America - Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union
So this Confederate apologists' myth is a monumental case of lying to oneself.