Concluding paragraph.
This is true, but not so in the sense in which the author intends it.
To be very particular, the war was about who was going to make the decision to end slavery and when: the southern States where slavery was practiced; or, the national government of the United States.
I don't believe slavery would have existed much longer: Brazil abolished slavery in 1888. The Europeans would have discovered that cotton could be grown more cheaply in India and elsewhere and the market for slave produced agricultural products would have inevitably declined, and the moral and political pressure in the South to end the practice would have become overwhelming.
Eli Whitney and John Deere freed the slaves.
“[But it’s not so complicated that we can’t see it for what it was—a war over slavery.] This is true, but not so in the sense in which the author intends it.Worth repeating.
To be very particular, the war was about who was going to make the decision to end slavery and when: the southern States where slavery was practiced; or, the national government of the United States.”
“But it’s not so complicated that we can’t see it for what it was—a war over slavery.”
Let me ask the question this way: If the South was fighting for slavery, who was fighting against slavery?
No it wasn't. That is just the propaganda that has been sold to justify the deaths of 750,000 people in a senseless war. The war was over who would control the money flow created by the Southern States.
Slavery got tossed in as a cause for the war effort about 2 years after the war started. Prior to that time, there was no intention of eliminating slavery.
The effort to portray the Civil War as an effort to free the slaves is contrary to the real history. It is just an after the fact rationalization for all the carnage.
The South saw secession as a strategy to preserve and even extend slavery, not just relinquish it slowly on terms of its choosing. Then, after the utter defeat of the Confederacy, the South spun the elaborate myth of the Lost Cause, which depicted the antebellum South as founded on happy slaves tending abundant fields, presided over by a gallant ruling class enjoying lives of virtue and noble leisure. The truth of the matter is that slavery was profoundly wrong, with the South both wrong and foolish to secede and go to war to try to preserve it.
Slavery in the US could only exist in an environment where land was essentially free. A free man farming his own land would always out-produce a slave who only worked as hard as he needed to avoid punishment. Thus, free men could out-bid slave plantation owners for land. Sooner, rather than later, slavery would fall to economic reality.
All governments through the world ended slavery in about a 60 year period of time, when it had been ongoing for several centuries, except for some Muslim groups where it is still practiced today.
The war wasn’t about slavery. It was about State’s rights and the War of Northern Aggression. The South ended slavery before the North. The South simply had more plantation and farming slaves than the North.