Exactly.
The Civil War wasn’t only, or even mostly, about slavery.
Not all slaves were black.
Not all slave owners were white.
Most Americans today have zero connection to slave holding.
Most Confederate soldiers were poor, uneducated farmers who just wanted to take care of their fields and their families.
I appreciate my veteran forefathers - Union and Confederate. And I wish today’s culture knew what “honor answering honor” means.
It was about slavery in the sense that much of the South was, unfortunately, a slave economy and everybody in it relied on slaves for their living. The best I ever heard it said was by a young historian at a museum in New Orleans who said that even though many people in the South knew slavery was wrong and many hoped it would end, freeing the slaves was essentially like having the government come along tomorrow and tell every farmer in the country that they had to hand over their tractors, combines, trucks, etc. and somehow still continue to make a living.
So while there were certainly those who thought that blacks were inferior and that slavery was appropriate for them, there were many others who were simply part of what was a bad system for which no reasonable alternative was offered.
Obviously, one single plantation owner could not suddenly go for a wage system while those around him continued running on slave labor. So there have been scholars who feel that if something could have been done to ease the economic transition (basically, to the “wage slavery” of the industrial areas of the North), the slavery issue could have been solved.
In addition, slavery is a very inefficient economic system, since the “owner” is responsible for feeding all those mouths no matter what, and even if he feeds them badly and treats them badly, he still has to keep them healthy enough to work. And, of course, since they are not machines, there is always the danger that they will revolt, and since they were more numerous than their owners, the odds were on their side. During their slave-economy days, the Romans found that out, and although the Roman army was fierce enough to crush the rebellions, slavery as a system gradually weakened.
In fact, it had died out altogether in Europe, to be replaced by feudalism, until the Islamic raids and seizing of Europeans as to be sold as slaves reintroduced the concept of buying (originally, ransoming), selling and “owning” human beings. And then Europeans themselves began to buy Africans from the Arab slave raiders.
So, yes, free blacks owned slaves in the South and basically everybody relied on slave labor as the thing that kept the barns full and the economy running. And this, rather than some commitment to the idea of racial inferiority, was what kept slavery in place.