But there are two sides to the issue and you're looking at only one side. On the one side there's Lincoln and the Union, and for him it never was about slavery and he said so on many occasions. On the other hand you have the confederacy, and there is an overwhelming amount of evidence supporting the fact that for them the single most important reason for going to war was to defend slavery.
In short Napolitano is wrong. The war was about slavery, he's just looking at it from the wrong side.
“But there are two sides to the issue and you’re looking at only one side.”
That’s true, but I feel I need only to look at one side to answer the rather limited issue to which I adressed myself. The issue is whether the war was All about slavery or not, not what the cause of the South’s rebellion was. I find it reductive to say that because the South cared about slavery more than anything else, the war was about slavery, and leave it at that. It was about slavery and union. It was about slavery, union, and other things.
I have to take into consideration the North’s position in order to understand why the war started, especially since they were the invaders (yes, after Fort Sumpter, which was an act of war, but wasn’t by itself the reason the North invaded, as we all know). By inquiring into whether or not it was all about slavery for the North, I find it was not. No need to go on from there. If it wasn’t all about slavery for the North, then it wasn’t all about slavery period. The South’s side is interesting but irrelevant to the issue, which as I’ve said is a narrow one.
“On the one side there’s Lincoln and the Union, and for him it never was about slavery and he said so on many occasions. On the other hand you have the confederacy, and there is an overwhelming amount of evidence supporting the fact that for them the single most important reason for going to war was to defend slavery.
In short Napolitano is wrong. The war was about slavery, he’s just looking at it from the wrong side.”
How can his side be wrong, when you admit yourself he’s right about Lincoln? Unless you think the North had no choice but to wage war, and everything that happened happened because the South started it. Back in reality, the federal government was not robotically reacting to the South. It had its own motivations and invaded for its own reasons. Lincoln stated them over and over: union, union, union. Then two years later, it was free the slaves, free the slaves, free the slaves.