To be fair, where did I romanticize slavery? Slavery was legal, although immoral, it's legacy was part of our countries past both North and South. In the early 19th century the newly created manufacturing culture of the North didn't need the slave model anymore so they sold all their slaves "down the river" to the south for a huge profit. Then the Northern mercantile class petitioned congress and raised tariffs on imports after making big money on selling their slaves to the south. Northerners then turned against that "peculiar" institution, a purely Southern institution at that point, on moral grounds making the hypocrisy factor unbelievable.
And yet despite all of the supposed hypocrisy, the south continued to pursue their institution and even fought for it.
And yes, it’s great that the wannabe revisionist-confederates like to say it wasn’t about slavery but those are exactly the people, the slave-owners, who did not want to remain in the Union after Lincoln was elected.
Lincoln’s election in and of itself was just an excuse for these hotheads to think they had something and it ended up in over 500,000 deaths, 11 states getting ravaged by the war AND 50 years of economic destitution and repercussions that last even to this day. Nice going.