White men fought against white men to prevent Negroes from moving north. The North, with some but not really very many notable abolitionist exceptions was motivated by a purer kind of racism than the South. In the South there was economic motivation to retain the peculiar institution. In the North there was an interest mainly in the immigrant community to restrict economic competition from Black labor. Those folks did not have much social or political power. Among the wealthier folks with power they cloaked their social disgust at the impoverished and ignorant Blacks they didn’t want anywhere near their wives and daughters with a thin veneer of abolitionist intent. The real intent og both these classes was to keep the Negro as far away as possible. They certainly did not want them fleeing to te north in numbers which is what began to happen.
Wow - you are in real competition for best historical revisionism vs. the author of this piece.
If the Confederate States had not seceded (and then lost the war), slavery probably would have continued much longer than it did in the US.