Nope. Not going to entertain that dodge for even a second.
The NORTHERN CONGRESS voted to keep slavery. These are the states that provided the armies for the war. They didn't send those armies to stop slavery, they sent those armies to stop INDEPENDENCE.
What the southern states said or didn't say has nothing to do with it. The NORTH did not fight over slavery. They fought to keep *CONTROL* of the money producing southern states.
It's time to get real. It was about slavery. Just a few minutes of basic research confirms this.
Stop. A century of propaganda has done it's work, and now it is universally believed. You will find this message spread every where you look.
The actions of the Northern congress and the economic numbers tell the real truth. The south was paying 72% of all the taxes in the Nation and the robber baron class in New York and their corrupt adjuncts in Washington DC were getting rich off of slavery in the south.
They invaded the South to keep that money coming in.
Doesn’t it follow then, that the actions of the South, succession, risk of war, were also about money? The wealthy planter class wanted to hold on to their money making property, the slaves, and foresaw the eventual end of slavery if they stayed in the union.
My own take:
States had the right to leave the union as an implicit principal of the nation’s founding.
It was not treason to leave the union. It was treason, against the founding principals, to force states to remain against the wishes of their citizens.
It was about money and power on both sides, the Southern planters’ wealth depending on slavery and the Northern industrialists’ wealth depending on Southern agricultural product.
It was also about morality. The implicit principals of the constitution gave the slaves the right to rise in rebellion, and arguably, the abolitionists the right to fight on behalf of the slaves.
The only thing that could have morally justified the war was freeing the slaves. Not keeping the Union. Although Texas reserving the right to leave suggests that leaving the Union was not going to be easy for the other states, that many held it indissoluble without previous exemption.
Bingo.
You can trace a direct line from this to our modern politics. It has never really changed. The Acela Corridor still is at the center of it all today. These parasites are still feeding off of the host body even today. The rest of the country can go through the Great Recession. The middle class can see hardly any real wage growth in 30 - 40 years, but Imperial Washington just gets richer and richer no matter what.