[jmacusa]

So then certainly for the South the war was about slavery.

[HandyDandy]

I can't speak for "the South", but certainly the Southern Slave Power leadership, J. Davis, Alexander Stephens and their ilk had mega maniacal plans when it came to slavery. They held forth that the peculiar institution should be perpetual, protected and never perish from this earth. They had every intention of enforcing it throughout their Confederacy. They had every intention of expanding their Confederacy around their imagined "Golden Circle". Cotton was King. Slavery was to be the engine that ran the Confederacy. There were to be no free states in the Confederacy.

This was the vision of the Leadership of the Confederacy. I cannot say this played into the vision of your typical southerner who was eking out a livelihood unrelated to the peculiar institution. They, for the most part were dragged in to protect their life and property from an "invader".

It is with too broad of a brush to say "for the South the War was about slavery". It is no exaggeration to say that for the Leadership of the Confederacy the War was most certainly all about slavery.