Another con. It was fought to make sure New York and North Eastern wealth controlled the Huge trade income from the South. It was fought to make sure competing industries weren't allowed to develop in the South.
It was fought because an independent South would have wrecked the North's economy and the Federal Government's revenues, 75% of which were paid for by the South.
Don’t let anyone say it was states rights.... the right they sought was to continue to treat other human beings as chattel.
Which Lincoln and the North fully intended to accommodate so long as they kept getting that sweet sweet money from Slave Labor. (See Corwin Amendment, which Lincoln supported.)
What clever Lincoln did was put the con on gullible people who are unaware that he supported the continuation of slavery in the South, just so long as the South stayed under the Control of the Washington D.C./New York cartel of influence. (Same people we are still fighting today, in case you haven't noticed.)
Laws had been passed that would have phased out slave ownership but the elites decided to go to war
But not to free the Slaves. They went to war to keep that slave produced money flowing into New York.
Look at this chart again. 75% of all that money pile on New York was created by Southern Slaves.
New York and Washington wanted that money to keep flowing. If the South went independent, that money flow stopped, and suddenly factories started getting built in the South, financed by all that additional money that would soon be heading there.
Southern independence was a serious economic threat to the interests of the Wealthy New York/Washington D.C. influence group. (Again, same people who mostly control the nation today.)
They didn't care about the suffering of slaves, they cared about making sure their pockets kept getting stuffed with Southern Produced European trade money.
But it sounds better to claim they killed 750,000 people for moral reasons. That's why they have been pushing this meme for the last 156 years.