edwinland, I stand humbly corrected and even more important with a bit more knowledge! That’s a reason I so enjoy this site. While receiving polite chastisement, I get fed information for intellectual fodder. Thank you, ever so much!
Thanks for your reply. I think the confusion is over the use of the word “slavery” alone when describing the causes of the civil war.
If you said that ‘abolition of slavery’ was not a driver of the war that would be correct, as Lincoln indeed tried to soothe the concerns of the South by insisting before and at the outset of the war that he had no intention of ending slavery in the South. And only a small % of the country favored abolition at the time.
But the issue of extending slavery into the territories was definitely a cause of the war, along with the slave trade and the general alignment of the whole country into slave and free States at the outset of the war.