“There had to be a war about slavery because, and only because the slave power wanted a war about slavery. No one else wanted a war about slavery.”
Sure, as long as you pretend that John Brown and his financiers and supporters in the North never existed.
“John Brown (May 9, 1800 – December 2, 1859) was an American revolutionary abolitionist, who in the 1850s advocated and practiced armed insurrection as a means to abolish slavery in the United States. He led the Pottawatomie Massacre, during which five men were killed, in 1856 in Bleeding Kansas, and made his name in the unsuccessful raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859. Later that year he was executed but his speeches at the trial captured national attention. Brown has been called “the most controversial of all 19th-century Americans” and “America’s first domestic terrorist.”
“Brown’s attempt in 1859 to start a liberation movement among enslaved African Americans in Harpers Ferry, Virginia electrified the nation. He was tried for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, the murder of five pro-slavery Southerners, and inciting a slave insurrection, found guilty on all counts, and was hanged. Southerners alleged that his rebellion was the tip of the abolitionist iceberg and represented the wishes of the Republican Party to end slavery. Historians agree that the Harpers Ferry raid in 1859 escalated tensions that, a year later, led to secession and the American Civil War.”
Aftermath of the raid
“The raid on Harpers Ferry is generally thought to have done much to set the nation on a course toward civil war. Southern slaveowners, hearing initial reports that hundreds of abolitionists were involved, were relieved the effort was so small. Yet they feared other abolitionists would emulate Brown and attempt to lead slave rebellions. Therefore the South reorganized the decrepit militia system. These militias, well-established by 1861, became a ready-made Confederate army, making the South better prepared for war.
“Southern Democrats charged that Brown’s raid was an inevitable consequence of the Republican Party’s political platform, which they associated with Abolitionism. In light of the upcoming elections in November 1860, the Republican political and editorial response to John Brown tried to distance themselves as much as possible from Brown, condemning the raid and dismissing Brown as an insane fanatic. As one historian explains, Brown was successful in polarizing politics:
“Brown’s raid succeeded brilliantly. It drove a wedge through the already tentative and fragile Opposition-Republican coalition and helped to intensify the sectional polarization that soon tore the Democratic party and the Union apart.”
“Many abolitionists in the North viewed John Brown as a martyr who had been sacrificed for the sins of the nation. Immediately after the raid, William Lloyd Garrison published a column in The Liberator, judging Brown’s raid as “well-intended but sadly misguided” and “an enterprise so wild and futile as this”. However, he defended Brown’s character from detractors in the Northern and Southern press, and argued that those who supported the principles of the American Revolution could not consistently oppose Brown’s raid. (Garrison reiterated the point, adding that “whenever commenced, I cannot but wish success to all slave insurrections”, in a speech in Boston on the day Brown was hanged).
“On December 22, 1859, John Greenleaf Whittier published a poem praising him, “Brown of Ossawatomie”.
After the Civil War, Black leader Frederick Douglass wrote, “His zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine—it was as the burning sun to my taper light—mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist)
I don't think either side "wanted" war, but the South---as did Imperial Japan in 1939 and Imperial Germany in 1914---had put itself on a "timetable for war" by its commitment to the Dred Scott decision saying that NO ONE could keep slavery out of the territories.
Again, if you have not read James Huston's astounding book, "Calculating the Value of the Union," to see that SLAVE WEALTH made up 1/3 of all wealth in Virginia in 1860, and MORE WEALTH than all the railroads and textile mills in the North put together, then you are being intellectually dishonest. The fact was, the South had to fight because it had insisted on keeping slavery and its entire economy---yes, even non-slaveholders---was inextricably dominated by slave wealth.
I hold that John Brown was unjustly convicted. He had never taken a oath of loyalty to Virginia, and thus should not have been convicted of treason to Virginia.
He could have been convicted of murdering a black man, but convicting a white man for the murder of a black man wouldn’t have suited the slave power.