Great info. You certainly can’t count WV. Were it not for the war there would be no West Virginia. Just like western NC, western VA was not proslavery. So the same could be said of both sides. And the fact that the states under both sides conformed to their respective sides beliefs only strenthens the arguement that it was slavery that started the war.
For some reason the discussion always deteriorates into a claim that “slavery had nothing to do with the war” because Union troops didn’t march under a banner labeled “Destroy Slavery,” and CSA troops under one labeled “Protect and Expand the Peculiar Institution.”
Wars, especially civil wars, are complicated things. As both sides found out in our civil war, once a war starts it gets even more complicated. The war begins running and controlling things rather than the men who started it.
Slavery was the root cause of the war. Anything else could be and was compromised. Slavery could not be. Either it was an evil to be contained and eventually eliminated or a positive good to be expanded in time and space. How do you compromise between those two positions?
OTOH, few on either side fought conciously and specifically for or against slavery. This shouldn’t be particularly surprising to us. The troops at D-Day didn’t storm the beaches with cries of “Save the Jews” either. But they did save them. Just as Union soldiers ended slavery despite that not being their main reason for fighting. And had the CSA won its independence, slavery would not have ended for decades, even though most rebs fought primarily to defend their homes.