Very good possibility! Just as today, the totalitarians hide behind “climate change”, it’s “all to save the planet”; then it was the “abomination” of slavery. Look up the laws in much of the northern territories, which forbade the entry of negroes.
An ugly truth which most people don't know is that the Northern states had an intense hatred of black people, and much of their opposition to slavery was not based on the immorality of forcing black people to work, it was because slavery brought black people into their communities and they wanted them absolutely kept out.
The primary opposition to slavery in the Northern states was the economic fear that a slave could do their job and thus render them unable to earn a living. This hatred for slavery is based on self-interest, and not on any concern for the slave.
Only a small contingent of what were at the time regarded as "kooks", opposed slavery on moral grounds. The vast majority of people in the North opposed it for the economic threat they saw it as to their working class, and the presence of black people it brought into their communities.
Not at all what we have all been taught.