The reasons for a war tend to change as the war evolves. For the Confederacy, secession was motivated by wanting to protect slavery, with the Civil War beginning as a fight for one's state and but then becoming a fight for honor. loyalty, and in part for the larger cause of an independent Confederacy. Yet occasional talk of emancipation by Confederates for the sake of winning the war were roundly rejected. As one letter to the editor in a Virginia newspaper complained about wartime emancipation proposals in Virginia, "If the war isn't about keeping our ni**ers, then why are we fighting?"
For the North, the war began as a fight against secession and for the Union, but it gradually transformed by incorporating the great cause of the era -- Emancipation -- in order to justify the immense cost and sacrifice that the war entailed.
Saying that the Civil War was about contemporary political issues simply makes no sense because it puts effects before causes.
More like doesn't want to discuss the weather when the focus should be on numbers and calculations. Numbers and Calculations such as the South producing 72% of the total trade with Europe while 60% of that money went to New York and Washington DC instead of to the producers.
Slavery is a red herring which has been used to distract from the money because the people who benefited from the result would prefer that people not look at what really happened.
For the North, the war began as a fight against secession...
Why would they have a moral right to oppose secession? They were all in favor of seceding from England, and Massachusetts and Connecticut asserted a right to secede from the US again and again. (Look up the Hartford convention.)
Have you noticed that when 230 million dollars was going to be removed from their income streams, suddenly they found a reason to be against secession?
but it gradually transformed by incorporating the great cause of the era -- Emancipation -- in order to justify the immense cost and sacrifice that the war entailed.
Well that's what we have been told, but considering how many lies i've found about what we've been told, I no longer just simply accept a narrative, especially when it benefits the people who kept the money.
Here is another possibility. When the war started, the North thought it would whip the South quickly. The first Battle of Bull Run was to be an entertaining affair. Dignitaries and well to do people packed a picnic lunch for the occasion of watching the rag tag Southern forces get their @$$ beat.
It turned into a rout, and the Northern dignitaries had to run in fear of their lives.
Over time, their confidence about beating the South turned into violent hatred at the people who were thwarting the will of the rich wealthy elite who controlled Washington DC. They became bitter and merciless, and they finally decided the best way to hurt the people of the South was to destroy 5 billion of their capital. The way to make them grovel was to take away their economic engine that gave them so much money in the first place.
You think freeing the slaves was done for moral reasons, but I now suspect it was done out of hatred for the people who defied them.
Sure, the 3% or so of the nation that was dedicated abolitionists kept proclaiming it to be a great moral cause, but you must remember the actual Northern powers voted to keep the black people enslaved forever with their Corwin amendment. The people in power didn't care about the slaves, they cared about hurting and destroying those people who dared defy them and dared to take money away from them.
Just think of how much modern liberals hate conservatives today, and realize that is exactly how much the Northern liberals of that era hated the Southern states for defying them.