Pal, you've got some odd ideas rattling around in your brain.
Let's see if I can help clarify:
First of all, before the 1860 election, only a small minority of Northerners were truly anti-slavery.
The rest were happy to vote for the pro-slavery Democrats or "Dough-faced" & "moderate" Whigs.
Even in 1860, 60% of the US electorate voted for pro-slavery parties.
Only 40% voted for the anti-Slavery Republicans.
But how did even 40% vote Republican?
Did they somehow suddenly desire "cheap labor for canal and rail lines"?
No.
It was books like "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and the execution of John Brown at Harper's Ferry that galvanized America's conscience.
It was also the Sunday sermons in thousands of Northern churches over many years, even decades, which slowly, slowly focused Northern attention on the indefensible moral status of slavery.
Were politics involved?
Of course -- after all, Lincoln was a former railroad lawyer who promised Federal aid to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
But this had nothing to do with slavery, or the South.
Finally, it was the South -- not the North -- which seceded and which began shooting, so it's the South's motivations which matter.
That is especially so since Lincoln, along with most "moderate" Northerners, was fully prepared for slavery to continue, and die a natural death long term -- provided slavery was not allowed to expand into non-slave territories and states.
So why did the South secede?
Answer: because they could not tolerate the idea that slavery would become a dieing institution.
And the South's reasons were not just sentimenal longings to preserve their antebellum life-styles.
The immediate, focused reason was: only by expanding the territories, states and even other countries for legal slavery could the demand for, and therefore the prices of slaves be kept high and growing.
That's what the Civil War was all about.
The rest is just, well, blather.
“So why did the South secede?”
I go back to my original posting about the war being for control of the economic future of the country. I don’t have the stats at my fingertips anymore and congratulate you on having them.
But don’t call my ideas odd and expect me to back off. They come from way, way back in my lineage and reflect both the working man’s way of looking at CW I, mixed with a more elitist version provided by the winner’s version.
I don’t usually go into detail about myself, and certainly not on CW thread slugfests. I have my own version of how I see things, and it’s not like those opposed have not attempted to persuade me otherwise—all through my life.
I have both slavers and abolitionists in my background. The abolitionist end mostly won out, but I’m not fool enough not to see the parallels with what is still occurring in the US. I’ve looped around behind the States Rights movement, but I’m no Pickett and I’m bloody well dug in on my thinking.
You can have your opinions about who started the violence, but there were several different kinds, not all of which were physical. They’re still not, and we’re still in a slave society without calling it that. Color of skin isn’t the source by a long shot, and the slavers are Northern now mostly, as I see it.