“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.
It was about slavery and what the South saw as the threat to its expansion caused by the election of Lincoln. Any other reason you care to mention pales in importance when compared with slavery. And he evidence supports that.
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).
That's like calling the U.S. Army the invader in World War II, which may be strictly true but ignores the fact that if the Germans and the Japanese had not initiated a war then the Army wouldn't have invaded anything. The same is true with the rebellion. The confederacy initiated a war. The North accepted the battle forced upon them and fought it to what was, for them, a successful conclusion. The Union army would not have gone anywhere had not the war come.
How can his side be wrong, when you admit yourself he’s right about Lincoln?
What little Napolitano got right about Lincoln appears to have happened by accident.
Unless you think the North had no choice but to wage war, and everything that happened happened because the South started it.
Well the North did have a choice I suppose. It could have surrendered following Sumter. It could have given in to that at of confederate aggression and given the confederacy what it wanted. Or Lincoln could have recognized the attack for what it was, a act of armed rebellion, and responded accordingly. He chose the second path. There is nothing underhanded or sneaky about that.
It had its own motivations and invaded for its own reasons.
Because the South chose war for its own reasons. No more and no less.