Even worse. They make it sound like the North was fighting against it! *THAT* is the big lie in these discussions.
Charles Dickens accurately saw the truth.
"I take the facts of the American quarrel to stand thus. 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. But the North having gradually got to itself the making of the laws and the settlement of the tariffs, and having taxed South most abominably for its own advantage, began to see, as the country grew, that unless it advocated the laying down of a geographical line beyond which slavery should not extend, the South would necessarily to recover it's old political power, and be able to help itself a little in the adjustment of the commercial affairs.Every reasonable creature may know, if willing, that the North hates the Negro, and until it was convenient to make a pretense that sympathy with him was the cause of the War, it hated the Abolitionists and derided them up hill and down dale. For the rest, there's not a pins difference between the two parties. They will both rant and lie and fight until they come to a compromise; and the slave may be thrown into that compromise or thrown out, just as it happens."
They don't get to claim morality points for freeing slaves when that was incidental to their true purpose; To smash the government which threatened them economically.
Yes if you want the facts of the matter go directly to a novelist who had last been to the U.S. almost 20 years before.
But protecting slavery was not incidental to the Confederacy, it was their raison d'etre.
Even though slavery was constitutionally recognized, that was not enough for 1861 secessionists.
They wrote more explicit acknowledgements into their new constitution.
Most Unionists were not particularly concerned about slavery in the South, but they were vitally concerned when secessionists provoked war, started war, declared war and waged war on Unionists and Union states.
Republicans, by definition, were abolitionists and so when war-time conditions made emancipations possible, they quickly took advantage.
But the Union did not go to war at first either to destroy slavery or for economic reasons (regardless of how loudly DiogenesLamp hollers it), but rather in response to the war Jefferson Davis ordered at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861.