The percentage of slave owners varied from state to state. The more northerly border states tended toward single-digit percentages. The deep south ranged from approximately 34% to 49% in Mississippi - http://www.civil-war.net/pages/1860_census.html
The South fought the coercion and tyranny the North, and for the very dirt below their feet.
There was no tyranny - except for the tyranny they perpetrated upon their own populations.
Tell me -- why didn't the northern states who also legalized slavery then also fight WITH the South if your claim is THE case?
The north went to war in response to being attacked by the confederates and with the aim to save the union. The south went to war to defend slavery and lost everything.
My argument here is NOT to defend slavery from whomever exploited it as a means to financial ends (FACT: BOTH the South AND North were economic beneficiaries of slavery.) Btw -- despite your stats, most of those who fought and died for the Southern Army were NOT slave-owners.
That said, it was the preservation of the American Union and NOT the destruction and end of Southern slavery that induced Lincoln to send armies South to coerce BY FORCE the South into remaining part of the Union. THAT my friend IS "Tyranny."
The North’s primary purpose was to prevent southern independence. It is the North that betrayed the Founding principle of “consent of the governed” from that celebrated secession document, the Declaration of Independence.
The South sought to peacefully secede, as technically was indeed their right. And again, I am not defending the South on the principle of preserving slavery, but its right to determine its own sovereignty to govern and live as IT deemed fit -- right or wrong.
"Slavery" was NOT the principle nor prime issue for Lincoln at all -- until he realized it could be used as a political propaganda tool.
The north went to war in response to being attacked by the confederates...
Unadulterated baloney.
Upon baiting and blockading the South at Charleston, Lincoln had provoked his war. The South merely began defending itself.
It has been said and repeated -- at ANY time during the war from beginning to end, Lincoln was willing to have allowed the South its slavery (a movement was already well underway to end it) IF ONLY the South would surrender its own sovereignty, end its secession movement, and return (as punished economic slaves and red-headed step-children) to the Union.