You said, “Because the economic sectors of those states reliant on slavery didn’t have sufficient political power to lead their states into rebellion. Every state that seceded had greater than 25% of its population as slaves. None of the four slave states that remained loyal to the United States had more than 20%, and the average of the four was more like 11% slave. Even the order in which the states seceded, with a couple of exceptions, almost directly reflects their percentage of slave population.”
My point was more that these states within the union were still allowed to even have slaves which proves that this war was not about freeing slaves and abolishing slavery.
Who said it was? Certainly not Lincoln. On the other hand, there are certainly plenty of southerners who said that their rebellion was because of the threat to slavery that they perceived.
The fact is that abolishing slavery throughout the United States would have required a constitutional amendment, and the slave states were numerous enough to insure that would never happen. And even when the war was underway, Democrats held enough seats in congress to block an amendment, although Lincoln kept pushing for one. It was only after the election of 1864, when the Republicans increased their seats, that they had sufficient votes to send the 13th amendment to the states.