“No he wasn’t, that’s why I now think we’ve been sold a bill of goods from people who claim slavery was the motivating factor for causing a war.”
Actually, it was. On two levels.
1 - Pride. The wealthy slave owners resented being told they were evil. If you read Thomas Sowell’s essay on Black Rednecks, it is obvious how being ‘dissed’ was viewed in the South.
2 - Expansion of slavery. The secession documents show the wealthy slave owners wanted slavery to expand, and felt allowing individual states to outlaw slavery unduly restricted their opportunities.
Georgia: “For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union for many years past in the condition of virtual civil war...
...The feeling of anti-slavery, which it was well known was very general among the people of the North, had been long dormant or passive; it needed only a question to arouse it into aggressive activity. This question was before us. We had acquired a large territory by successful war with Mexico; Congress had to govern it; how, in relation to slavery, was the question then demanding solution. This state of facts gave form and shape to the anti-slavery sentiment throughout the North and the conflict began. Northern anti-slavery men of all parties asserted the right to exclude slavery from the territory by Congressional legislation and demanded the prompt and efficient exercise of this power to that end. This insulting and unconstitutional demand was met with great moderation and firmness by the South.”
Mississippi: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery— the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union...”
SOuth Carolina: “But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution....
...Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection....”
Texas: “The controlling majority of the Federal Government, under various pretences and disguises, has so administered the same as to exclude the citizens of the Southern States, unless under odious and unconstitutional restrictions, from all the immense territory owned in common by all the States on the Pacific Ocean, for the avowed purpose of acquiring sufficient power in the common government to use it as a means of destroying the institutions of Texas and her sister slaveholding States....
...In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color— a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.”
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states
Pretty hard to ignore that slavery WAS a genuine cause of the Civil War. Not because the North was going to abolish it in the South, but because the North would not support it or expand it.
All that said, I don’t doubt the average Confederate soldier fought almost entirely for “freedom” - to be left alone. My great-grandfather fought for Indiana. Had he been born in Alabama, he’d have fought for Alabama. He was a poor man himself and probably didn’t think deeply about political causes. Very, VERY few northerners fought to “end slavery”. And very few southerners fought to “preserve slavery”.
Robert E Lee - who my great-grandfather named a son after, and how my Dad was named after - fought because his ties to Virginia were stronger than his ties to the Federal government. I don’t fault him for that. I am 100% certain he did what he believed was right. He wasn’t fighting for slavery per se, but for Virginia to be left alone by the Federal government. He and his family, and the entire country, paid a terrible price. For my part, I see no value in blaming either side. I doubt 1 American in 100 today realizes how important the states were to the people living in them in 1860.
1 - Pride. The wealthy slave owners resented being told they were evil. If you read Thomas Sowell’s essay on Black Rednecks, it is obvious how being ‘dissed’ was viewed in the South. People don't like being called "deplorables" by their social elite "betters" in places like Boston and New York? Why I can't imagine why that might have bothered them.
2 - Expansion of slavery. The secession documents show the wealthy slave owners wanted slavery to expand, and felt allowing individual states to outlaw slavery unduly restricted their opportunities.
I believed that theory for most of my life. In fact I believed it up until about two years ago when I found out the facts don't support the claim. Slavery was predominantly cotton. Cotton was the only thing making slavery profitable. In what territory will cotton grow? None. (Maybe a teeny bit in Kansas.)
If cotton won't grow in the territories in 2019, then it wouldn't grow in the territories in 1860 either.
I'm going to skip your regurgitation of the secession documents. Only three, perhaps four say anything about slavery being the reason for secession. Virginia's certainly says nothing about slavery, it says they are leaving because the government is trying to make war on states which are exercising their right to leave.