The "control" of the laws was only for one purpose, and that was to preserve slavery, period. Southerners could dress up their pig anyway they sought in constitutional language, but it still came back to being all about slavery.
I'm sorry, but that's just a polemicist's chestnut. I've explained it to you, and if you want to insist on being a South-bashing neoliberal, I guess you're at liberty. But you won't go uncontradicted on this board.
That's not what your Northern editorialists said, when it got down to the nut-cutting. And that isn't what the British editorialists believed, either, when they examined the question.
Abolition vs Union The Times of London
The Emancipation Proclamation
15 January 1863It would seem that in the interval which has elapsed between the battle of Fredericksburg and the commencement of the new year the advocates of more conciliatory and more violent counsels have fairly fought their battle out, and that victory has declared in favour of the latter. Mr. LINCOLN has finally adhered to the policy from which he showed at one moment some inclination to draw back. He has kept his promise to the very letter; be has declared the negroes in the States now at open war with the North free, except within certain districts occupied by the Federal forces, and has pledged the Government of the United States to recognize and support the freedom so granted by their naval and military force. From this Proclamation Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Maryland are exempt; so that it would seem to be the policy of the PRESIDENT to interpose an isthmus of slavery between the two masses of free States which are to extend to the North and South of it.
Pronounced under other circumstances, by another person, and at another time, such a Proclamation might well excite once more the enthusiasm which penetrated the whole mind of England in the days Of WILBERFORCE and CLARKSON. We should most unfeignedly rejoice were the words to which the PRESIDENT has given utterance capable of carrying with them their own fulfilment. To slavery we have ever entertained the most rooted aversion. Not all the valour, not all the success of the South, has ever blinded us to this black spot on their fair escocheon. But even tainted as they are with this foul stain they have commanded our admiration and our sympathy from the gallantry with which they have maintained their cause, and from the obvious truth that the struggle was for separation on the one part and compulsory retention on the other, the emancipation or continued slavery of the negro being only used as means to forward the ends of the North. While it was supposed that the South could be brought back by giving every security for the continuance of slavery, the North never dreamt of emancipation. When it was found that no such conciliation was possible, the North, as a weapon of war, and not as a concession to principle, has finally decided on emancipation. That this measure is no homage to principle or conviction, but merely a means of raising up a domestic enemy against the Southerners in the midst of the Southern States, is abundantly proved from the fact that slavery, so odious in Alabama, is tolerated in Kentucky. Its abolition is a punishment to rebels; its retention is a reward to patriots; it is not the accursed thing to be rooted out at all hazards. Its abolition is the punishment of rebellion; its retention is the reward of adherence to the Union.
-- Quoted in Abraham Lincoln, A Press Portrait, auth. Mitgang.
This editorial was previously posted in another thread, in 2004, and is brought to your attention in case you hadn't had a chance to examine its judicious weighing of the "all about slavery" argument, as advanced at the time by Abraham Lincoln.
For what it's worth, I disagree somewhat with The Times and give Lincoln full credit for being an abolitionist from 1855 forward. The implication, however, is that he misled the public for over eight years until he had a chance to reveal his real agenda, and that he took the nation to war, precisely to achieve what he could not have done within the bounds of the Constitution had the South not seceded; and that therefore the Civil War was Lincoln's way of inviting the Southern men to take it out in the alley, where Lincoln could prevail without the nagging constraints of rule of law, due process, and constitutionalism.
I would also mention Lincoln's oath of office in this connection, but since Lincoln wasn't religious, perhaps he felt himself at liberty to do as he thought best, like so many later 20th-century heads of state.