I don’t defend the confederacy I am just looking for the truth as to what happened.
however, I am beginning to not believe the view that the south left because of slavery.
I recently watched a video of Thomas DiLorenzo on youtube. http://nz.youtube.com/watch?v=nbFty9nZUac this was very interesting.
Despite its provocative insights and obvious rhetorical skill, however, The Real Lincoln is seriously compromised by careless errors of fact, misuse of sources, and faulty documentation. Although individually these flaws may seem trivial and inconsequential, taken together they constitute a near-fatal threat to DiLorenzo's credibility as a historian. A few examples indicate the scope of the problem: DiLorenzo's own article on Lincoln as "The Great Centralizer" appeared in the The Independent Review in 1998, not in 1988 (p. vii); Lincoln advised sending freed slaves to Liberia in a speech in 1854, not "during the war" (pp. 16-17); Lincoln was not a member of the Illinois state legislature in 1857 (p. 18); the commerce clause was not an "amendment," and Thomas Jefferson was not among the framers of the Constitution (pp. 69-70); Thaddeus Stevens was a Pennsylvania representative, not a senator (p. 140); and Fort Sumter was not a customs house (p. 242).
Unfortunately, these lapses are more than matched by a clumsy mishandling of sources that violates the presumed trust between author and reader. DiLorenzo claims, for example, that in the four years "between 1860 and 1864, population in the thirteen largest Northern cities rose by 70 percent" (p. 225). On the face of it, this statistic is absurd and defies common sense, and sure enough, the source DiLorenzo cites says that the growth occurred "in fifteen years." Page 11 says that Lincoln's law partner and biographer William Herndon was quoting his own recollections of Lincoln, but he really was quoting another biographer. A few pages later (p. 14), DiLorenzo claims that Lincoln, in his eulogy for Henry Clay, "mustered his best rhetorical talents to praise Clay," but all of the examples that follow come from the "beautiful language" of a newspaper that Lincoln was quoting at length. Moreover, Lincoln's supposed comment about the "deportation" of blacks in his Cooper Union speech was in fact a quotation from Thomas Jefferson, as Lincoln himself says (p. 18). In chapter 3, DiLorenzo claims that in a letter to Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln "admitted that the original [Emancipation] proclamation had no legal justification, except as a war measure" (p. 37). His source, however, is the recollections of a conversation (not a letter) that portrait artist Francis B. Carpenter (not Chase) had with Lincoln, and at no point do these recollections sustain DiLorenzo's summary of them. Moreover, in the reference for this section, DiLorenzo misidentifies the title of his source as Paul Angle's The American Reader, when in fact the jumbled material comes from Angle's The Lincoln Reader. Other errors include misplaced quotation marks, missing ellipses, and quotations with incorrect punctuation, capitalization, and wrong or missing words.
Further examination of the endnotes leads into a labyrinth of errors beyond the ingenuity of Ariadne's thread. On page 281, for instance, note 1 cites page 66 of David Donald's Lincoln, when in fact the quotation comes from page 66 of Donald's Lincoln Reconsidered. On the next page, note 7 cites Lincoln's debate with Stephen Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois, on August 21, 1858, but the quotation comes from the debate at Charleston, Illinois, on September 18, 1858. Moreover, hardly a single citation of the Basler edition of Lincoln's Collected Works includes the volume number (see notes 25, 26, and 33), and several of the remaining citations of the Collected Works turn out in fact to be references to Basler's Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings (notes 24, 31, and 44). Note 9 on page 282 again cites Lincoln's 1858 debate with Douglas at Ottawa, but the quotations this time actually come from Lincoln's 1852 eulogy for Henry Clay. Note 14 leads down another blind alley to no trace of the quoted material. On page 287, note 3 cites the wrong page number from Donald's Lincoln, and although note 4 immediately following says "ibid.," it actually refers to Basler's Abraham Lincoln. On page 293, DiLorenzo cites Federalist No. 36 as his source, but the quotation comes from Federalist No. 46. Sad to say, this catalog of errors is only a sampling. Readers looking further into the matter will find incorrect titles and subtitles as well as misspelled publishers' names. Obviously, in view of these problems, the maze of endnotes does not provide the "meticulous documentation" promised by the book's dust jacket.
It was not the only reason but it was the most important. I’ve yet to see a credible case made that we would have had the war without that issue in play.
If you do an intenet search and find the secession justifications of the seceding states, you’ll see that these documents are dominated by worry about the future of slavery. Other issues were minor irritants.