No.
Very few Northerners cared about slavery one way or the other in the South.
Abolitionists in those days were a fringe group equivalent to today's, oh, say, Libertarians -- meaning important, but a small minority.
Indeed, nearly all Northerners cared more about Union than about slavery, and that is why before 1856, they all voted for pro-slavery parties -- the Democrats and Whigs.
All Northerners were content to let slavery rule in the South, if that was the price of Union.
But what Northerners certainly did care about was slavery in the North and western territories: they didn't want it -- no way, no how, under no guise.
But the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision effectively meant slavery was legalized everywhere, and at that point, the North fully switched from pro-slavery Democrats & Whigs to anti-slavery Republicans.
Of course, neither Lincoln nor most other Republicans wanted to abolish slavery in the South, they just wanted to be d*mn certain it stayed there.
Sorry, but you'll never understand the Civil War if you begin by thinking of the Slave Power as a "victim".
From the beginning, slave-holders were aggressors on the American body politic.
Some areas were heavily dependent upon slave labor, and some were not. That those areas not heavily dependent upon it were the ones moralizing the most is not at all surprising. Cheap morality, no skin off their noses.
That there were also regional rivalries and even ethnic differences played into the matter. There had been human bondage in one form or another for all recorded history up to that point, the southern states didn't invent the practice, and the United States did not put an end to it in the world, since it exists to this very day. Now, what were you saying, about this oddly hypnotic, all-powerful "slave power?"
So why not compensation as was done everywhere else? The UK had abolition prior to the US.
Here’s a hint - the war wasn’t about slavery otherwise compensation was the solution. It was about the same thing it was back in the 1820s. Nullification.
Flemings quite rightly proposes a clash of absolutes. In any case, the number of abolitionists was small but significant, including most of the New England intelligentia and many northern evangelicals in the banks of settlers reaching all the way into Iowa. Like Muslim radicals, they had the support of many “moderates,” who silently nodded their approval, and voted for “the right sort.” When such men gain the levers of power, they can work a revolution, just as the gay activists have done,