The business of using government to force others to conform began well before the Civil War - government was used by one group of slaveholders to reinforce their power over the slaves, even over other slaveholders, to prevent them from teaching slaves to read.
See : http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/experience/education/docs1.html
This wasn’t merely denying slaves education, just as Democrats do today to keep blacks on the plantation...it of course also had the effect of denying some slaves religious liberty by barring them from reading the full Bible for themselves, unfiltered.
What is more, they also brought on the Civil War by imposing their immorality on non slave holders in states to the north, forcing them and their officials to catch and return escaped slaves to their masters.
And all this before Lincoln.
You aren't going to like what I am about to tell you, but those northern states agreed to that morality when they ratified the US Constitution.
Article IV, Section 2 makes it a requirement to return slaves to their owners.
Now a lot of people don't realize that clause is in there, but it is, and if the Northern states didn't want to abide by that requirement, they shouldn't have agreed to it.
If the Northern states insisted on reneging on the contract, they should have just separated from the Southern States, and let things go back to the way they were before 1789.