My point is that almost nobody of sound mind in the north was willing to die or risk death for the sake of ending slavery. Those that fought willingly did so to preserve the union, not to "free the slaves," and rightly so. People today have so bought into the narrative of slavery as "America's original sin" and its abolition as the driving force of the Union cause that they retroject this sentiment back to 1861.
So far as I can tell from the posts, no one here is claiming this - or believes it to be true. I do often see it cited by the pro-confederate side as a strawman.
I don’t think anyone would argue that very few people in the north wanted to go to war to end slavery. Hardcore abolitionist numbers are hard to come by because there was no polling then. Numbers I’ve seen vary from 2%-10% based on memberships in abolitionist society’s.
There was however a very large percentage of northerners who saw slavery as wrong and wanted to see it ended. The Republican Party was founded in part on that proposition. However they didn’t want to go to war to end it. They wanted a return to the founders original intent and put it on the road to extinction.
Even this was to much for the slaveocracy. They didn’t just want to stop it from being out on the road to extinction, they wanted the world to acknowledge that it was a positive good. So they gambled it would be better protected in their own nation. They then lost it all.
Again, the thing that gets me is that there weren’t more abolitionist in America. In a supposedly “Christian nation” founded on the ideal of all men created equal it should have been 80-90% of the people wanting to end slavery by all means necessary.