It was fought for economic reasons. Slaves were the second most valuable piece of capital in the south, after the land. They were worth billions (of 1860 dollars). The election of the Republicans was seen as a threat to that capital, so the south fought a war to protect that property.
Does anyone know the percentage of soldiers in the Confederate Army who came from a slave holding family?
“...so the south fought a war to protect that property.”
Wrong, my friend. The South seceded because of tariffs and what it saw as the unequal allocation of tax money. The South paid the vast majority of the revenues that made up the federal tax base (in those days there were no federal corporate taxes, no federal income taxes, no federal sales taxes, etc.). Rather, the federal treasury was funded primarily through the revenues from tariffs. Since the South was a far, far bigger trading partner with the rest of the world than the North was (because of cotton and tobacco, especially), its products and goods generated the vast majority of federal revenues. However, the vast majority of those revenues were spent in the North. The South, rightfully, thought it was getting screwed, since its interests funded the federal treasury but little or none of those revenues were spent on anything in the South (in a nutshell, the South didn’t see why it had to fund and financially support the North, while the North contributed nothing to the South. It’s kind of like over-taxed American citizens getting riled up about having to fund liberal wet dreams of welfare and all the other touchy-feely scams the federal government trots out to take care of the unproductive and dependent). The federal government, which was dominated by Northern states because of the population imbalance, sought to increase the tariffs, and thus hit Southern interests particularly hard. The South believed that the actions of the federal government were not only oppressive to Southern interests, but violated the Constitution. When the South saw that it was not going to get any redress or see any change in what the federal government had in store for it, it had no choice but to void the compact with the Union and secede. Slavery was pretty much a non-issue as far as the North was concerned (else, why was slavery still legal in many states in the North, though not practiced to the extent it was in the South?). The so-called Emancipation Proclamation, which was issued in January, 1863 (more than two years after South Carolina had seceded, by the way) in actuality freed no one, because it only applied to states that “were in rebellion against the Union.” It did not apply to the alve-holding neutral border states, and, most telling, did not apply to those areas of the Confederacy that were under Union occupation (such as parts of Louisiana); thus, the Proclamation didn’t even free the slaves over which the Union held control!