I long ago accepted the truth that most wars are about money. Taxes, access to a river or the sea, trading rights, rich farmland, oil, minerals, it comes down to money. Are we to believe it was somehow magically different 165 years ago? That people weren't just as greedy and venal back then? There is a reason none of this is taught in the government schools. I got all the way through college and didn't realize any of the financial aspects of ante bellum America. It simply was not taught. Once you understand it was the South that was generating the vast majority of the exports and thus carrying out the vast majority of the imports....that it was actually the South which was the MUCH richer region of the country when it was founded....suddenly it starts to make a whole lot more sense.
Reading the often scathing commentary of the English - who were real abolitionists - is especially enlightening. They saw right through the BS and propaganda about how the North was supposedly fighting to free the slaves (even though they openly said they weren't and offered slavery by express constitutional amendment which was also never taught in the government schools).
An 1862 editorial in an English journal commented, “They (the Northern white men) do not love the Negro as a fellow-man; they pity him as a victim of wrong. They will plead his cause; they will not tolerate his company.”
This is one of the things that clued me into believing something was very wrong with the way we have been taught the history of the Civil War. It's the things that they didn't teach us that first aroused my suspicions.
Decades ago, when I was in Junior High, we were studying this era of history. I asked the teacher what I thought was a relevant question at the time, and I didn't get what I considered a sensible answer.
I said: "Since all the battles were fought on land, and since you have to have soldiers to take and hold land, what was the purpose of the blockade? Why did they think it was so important?"
He said they instituted it to give the Navy something to do. They had ships, and they weren't going to turn sailors into soldiers, so they stationed them off the Southern coasts to disrupt Southern traffic, perhaps to keep them from getting guns from Europe."
I said that "it didn't look like they were successful at keeping guns out of the hands of the Confederates, because they fought plenty of battles with guns."
But it always seemed his answer about "giving the navy something to do" was silly.
Later, when I better understood the economics of the situation, I realized that the blockade was the most important thing they could do during the war.
And then I found out they didn't mention how the war actually started. They left out all the parts about Lincoln sending a fleet of warships to threaten the Confederates.
And then I found out the Northern controlled congress passed a permanent slavery amendment. That was never mentioned in school.
And then I found out "expansion of slavery" was just lie.
The deeper into it I looked, the more coverup I saw. I finally realized we had been sold a narrative that makes the winners look good, but it isn't the truth of what happened.