That explanation completely ignores the succession of Sectional Crises that precipitated the Civil War, all of which were rooted in the question of expanding slavery into new territories -- a subject about which both sides were demonstrably willing to fight.
Because that would decide which coalition in congress each state would join. The Slave states felt that only other slave states would vote with them in Congress, and the Northern states felt the same way. The real issue was the power of representation, and each side wanted it because it would control federal policy on tariffs, protectionism, and other economic issues.
The sectional issues would not have been resolved, even if Lincoln had permitted the secession to continue. For example, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 limited the expansion of slavery to territories below the Mason-Dixon Line. That was fine, to a point -- but eventually the Slave Territories below the M-D Line ran out of arable land. Clearly that was unsustainable from the perspective of the slave states: to expand their plantation system, they had to expand north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
And you think they were going to grow cotton North of the Mason Dixon line?
Meanwhile, north of the Line, the Free states were expanding westward into an agricultural gold-mine, and they weren't going to give that over to slave-holders.
What, wheat? Barley? Oats? Molasses? None of that makes economic sense with slaves.
And you also, of course, leave out the fact of slavery in and of itself. To defend the South on the terms the South itself defined, you're in the position of having to defend the continuation of slavery. There are no two ways about it.
I am not defending the South and their slavery, I am defending the United States and it's founding principle of Independence. Just as with freedom of speech, we must support people's rights to speak ideas of which we disagree, so too with people's right to independence and for reasons with which we may not agree.
The point is they had a right to Independence, as Declared in our own Founding Document "four score and seven years " earlier, and the fact that they were doing so for whatever reason does not take away from them the right to leave if they so chose.
From the perspective of the North, the abolition of slavery is easily justified as a matter of the same basic human rights that were laid out in the Declaration of Independence, and in the writings of the Founders themselves. It's an easy case to make, because it is a moral case.
Nonsense. The Founders had absolutely no intention of granting slaves their freedom when they wrote the Declaration of Independence. Not even Jefferson believed that, though he strongly flirted with the idea. We can all laud the principle of "all men are created equal", but it is dishonest to think the founders accepted it in the same manner as you are asserting.
In fact, throughout the whole ordeal, the welfare of the slaves was not of primary concern to anybody, and certainly if the South had stopped fighting early enough, the Slaves would have remained in bondage. So let us not fool ourselves as to why the North was fighting. It had little to do with the slaves, and a whole lot to do with controlling their masters.
As for the South, you're left trying to make economic excuses for the continuation of slavery, with the inevitable conclusion that, "oh, eventually they'd have stopped enslaving people because of technology," or some such.
It happened everywhere else in the world except here. Why would we think that if it were left alone it would not have been abolished here too?
And no, i'm not trying to make economic excuses for the continuation of slavery, I am trying to point out that it was for the control of the money which the slaves were producing that caused the North to invade the South. The North told them repeatedly that they could keep slavery, but the one thing they could not have was financial independence from Washington Trade and Tax policy.
And as for the Southern economy itself -- they made no bones about the fact that, to them, slavery and the economy were inextricably bound together.
And that I do not dispute. Slavery was the economic engine of the South, and for four score and seven years it was legal in the Union. It was an ugly practice, but it was a legal and profitable one, and therein lies the cause of the war. Money.
