Poll: 4 in 10 Southerners Still Side With Confederacy

A century and a half after the opening shots of the U.S. Civil War, nearly four in 10 Southerners say they still sympathize with the Confederacy.

That's according to a new CNN poll released on the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, when Union soldiers raised a U.S. flag over Fort Sumter in South Carolina and the opening shots of the war rang out. The poll's results reveal that the war that divided the nation for four years still divides American public opinion today.

In the South, 38 percent of respondents said they sympathize with the Confederacy, which lost the bloody war. More than 600,000 American soldiers on both sides were killed. Overall, the number from all geographic areas who said they still side with the South is less than a quarter.

Re-enactors portraying Union soldiers, 150th Anniversary,

Richard Ellis, Getty Images

Re-enactors portray Union soldiers occupying Fort Sumter in South Carolina's Charleston Harbor. Tuesday was the 150th anniversary of the first shot fired in the Civil War, when Confederate guns fired on the fort.

The poll also reveals divisions over what Americans see as the reason the Civil War was fought. Overall, 54 percent of respondents said they believe the war was over slavery, and 42 percent said that wasn't the main reason. Those percentages didn't change substantially when it comes to Northerners versus Southerners. But the issue of slavery was different for respondents from opposing political parties, and different races.

Sixty-five percent of respondents who described themselves as Democrats said they believe the Civil War was fought over slavery, while 45 percent of Republicans said so. The belief was strongest among nonwhite Americans as well. Some 66 percent of nonwhite respondents said they believe slavery was the main reason for the war, while about half of white people thought so.

The poll also examined whether the responses of tea party supporters were different from those of Americans who described themselves as opposed to the grass-roots conservative movement, or those who said they were neutral to it.

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Tea party supporters were only 2 percent more likely to have sympathy for the Confederacy instead of the North, and that difference falls well within the poll's margin of error for that question. Tea party supporters were 9 percent more likely to say they have "some" admiration for the leaders of Southern states during the Civil War, compared with those who said they oppose the tea party. But compared with the poll's overall numbers, their views fell within 2 percentage points of the general population -- again, within the poll's margin of error.

The poll was conducted by CNN and the Opinion Research Corp. Pollsters surveyed 824 adult Americans by phone between April 9 and 10. The poll's overall margin of error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points, though the sampling errors were slightly higher for some questions.