Acquiescence to a pro-slavery amendment pretty much contradicts the theory that "Slavery is so evil we must launch a massive war to stop it!"
Lincoln's position was "If you want your slavery, you can keep your slavery", which makes it sound very much like the continuation of Slavery was not a bone of contention for the USA, therefore it is deceitful to claim the war was fought over it.
If Slavery was not the bone over which the two sides fought, then what was? What was the sole non negotiable for Lincoln? It was economic independence. That is the one thing he would never allow.
I said slavery was a cause of the war -- the cause in different ways, some indirect and some quite deep.
How can it be the cause of the war when it was offered up on a silver platter by Lincoln a month before the war started? As Charles Dickens noted at the time. "Slavery has in reality nothing on earth to do with it, in any kind of association with any generous or chivalrous sentiment on the part of the North." (and he wasn't writing to the public, but was instead writing in a private letter to someone else.)
The Truth is that the North would have tolerated slavery in the South for the next several decades, so long as the South remained in the Union. They could not legally dislodge it even if they had tried. There simply wasn't enough anti-slavery states to vote it out.
What was the country arguing about throughout the 1850s? The expansion of slavery.
What did secessionists fear most? The extinction of slavery.
Slaveowners knew that the election of a Republican candidate who ran on a free soil platform and didn't get any votes in most of the slave states would mean the eventual end of slavery. They did not trust any concessions Republicans would make. And Northerners were getting tired of making concessions.
As Charles Dickens noted at the time. "Slavery has in reality nothing on earth to do with it, in any kind of association with any generous or chivalrous sentiment on the part of the North." (and he wasn't writing to the public, but was instead writing in a private letter to someone else.)
What's next for you? Citing Ezra Pound's understanding of what started the Second World War? Creative writers aren't the people we usually go to when we want to understand history and politics.
The Truth is that the North would have tolerated slavery in the South for the next several decades, so long as the South remained in the Union. They could not legally dislodge it even if they had tried. There simply wasn't enough anti-slavery states to vote it out.
That's certainly possible, maybe even likely. But slave owners feared that slavery was threatened and under attack. They believed slavery would be safer outside the union and their own power would be greater in a country of their own.