The immediate cause of Civil War was the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, April 12, 1861, followed by the Confederate Declaration of War on the United States, May 6, 1861.
Neither of those had anything to do, directly, with slavery.
But slavery was an important part of the "mix" from beginning to end -- from Confederate "Reasons for Secession" documents to Union "Contraband of War" laws, to the Emancipation Proclamation to the 13th Amendment.
So claims that try to minimize the role of slavery are a-historical.
servantboy777: "In fact, the overwhelming majority of those brave and honorable men fighting for the cause of the South were too damn poor to own slaves.
So, what was it they were fighting to preserve?"
The usual estimate going back to Civil War times is that about 25% of Confederate soldiers came from slaveholding families. Units from the Deep South had more slaveholders, those from Upper South & Border States had fewer.
One problem with even this 25% estimate is that very few Confederate soldiers came from regions in the Confederacy with few to no slaves. Such regions typically supported the Union cause.
So even when Confederate soldiers did not themselves own slaves, most had family members and close neighbors who did own slaves and whose "way of life" depended on slavery.
So those soldiers felt a vested interest in their "peculiar institution" beyond simply their need to defend their homeland.
servantboy777: "Because of revisionism, most do not realize the so called great emancipator Lincoln” before the war and the great Northern general Grant after the war both sought to recolonizing the negro back to Afrika, Caribbean and Puerto Rico.
They believed the negro would likely not assimilate into American society."
The word for that is "recolonization" and it was official US government policy, supported by many Presidents and state governments beginning around 1820.
From roughly 1820 until the Civil War, huge sums of money were appropriated by the Federal government and state governments to support "recolonizing" freed slaves to, primarily, Liberia in Africa.
The results were always disappointing -- the numbers who volunteered to go were few, and most of them died within a few years of arriving in Africa, or elsewhere.
But the efforts continued and did not end until Lincoln's much larger projects failed on a larger scale.
And by then African-American leaders were telling their government they didn't want to "recolonize" Africa, rather they wanted full citizenship in the United States.
And so that's just what happened, eventually.
servantboy777: "Furthermore, Lincoln himself wrote to newspaper editor Horace Greeley his intentions regarding the war of Northern aggression. Preserve the Union at all costs. Freed slaves or NOT."
What Lincoln actually did in office was free as many slaves as he believed he lawfully could, beginning with compensated emancipation in Washington, DC, and "Contraband of War" confiscations, progressing to the much larger Emancipation Proclamation and then the 13th Amendment.
servantboy777: "Most do not realize that at one point, there were more white slaves than black."
But no white "slaves" in North America ever endured the degradation of permanent inherited chattel slavery based solely on their race.
The typical "white slave" was an indentured servant who had contracted for a period of years to work off their debts.
The other major category were convicted prisoners serving long sentences, to be freed if they survived their term.
servantboy777: "It was the black man who first sold the black man into slavery."
Because there was a market for slaves, with white buyers -- the buyers came first, the slaves were captured to satisfy their demands. No reason to sugar-coat any of this.