Like all people who think it is ok for the feds to intervene in states business as long as the "cause" is worthy, you forget one thing. The states alone had the constitutional right to decide whether or not they were free or slave. Thus the war was fought over states rights, whether the states seceded for a "worthy" cause or an evil one isn't the point. The point that statists, such as yourself, keep missing is that states rights take precedent over the feds, regardless of what that right entails.
Slavery would have died out of it's own volition in just a few years, without the loss of life and, more importantly, without the loss of the 10th amendment which we suffered through the action of the oppressive(yep, that's the word)Fed government under Lincoln.
I'm a jack booted thug, alright. Lock up your guns, I'm coming for them!
In fact, I never said I agreed with the action of the federal government, or that I felt states don't have the right to withdraw from the union. You assume much. I merely assert that while it is nice to suggest that slavery wasn't the driver behind the war because the alternative isn't a very morally comfortable position to be in, it doesn't change the fact that slavery was THE issue of the day and it was why the south seceded. The north didn't march into the south to free the slaves, that is true. They marched in to coerce the south back into the fold at the point of a gun. So yes, the war was fought over the secession. The secession came about because of the issue of slavery. You just can't separate one from the other.
But the right for the state to remain slave was never in danger. Only the expansion of slavery into the territories, and the probable result that few, if any, new slave states would be added. Is that a "worthy" cause?
Slavery would have died out of it's own volition in just a few years, without the loss of life and, more importantly, without the loss of the 10th amendment which we suffered through the action of the oppressive(yep, that's the word)Fed government under Lincoln.
I would defy you to provide a quote from a single Southern leader who believed that. On the contrary, they believed slavery would be an institution that they handed down to their children and grandchildren.