Please point to anywhere in my some tens of thousands of posts that I have said the war was solely about slavery.
What I have said is that it was the root and core reason for the hostility. All other issues could be, and were, compromised. Slavery by its very nature cannot be handled that way. Either people are enslaved or they are not.
Tariffs, for example, are often used as a or the reason for the war. The problem with this is that in 1860 tariffs were the lowest they’d been in the nation’s history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_United_States_history#/media/File:US-Tariffs.svg
Perhaps more critically, do you really want to try to justify a massive war and its death and destruction over tariff rates, which northern consumers paid at exactly the same rate as southern consumers? Really?
It is curious how the victors’ historians have so discounted the South’s claims of economic inequity, where they prefer to discuss the misery and oppression of slavery over an economic system that consists of decades of numbers and data that take so much to evaluate in the context of north/south attitudes and which have been altered over the years.
Besides relying solely on the Wiki assessment, one might read John C. Calhoun’s thoughts on tariffs as well as the works of Clyde Wilson on tariffs and secession.
Lastly, I’m not trying to justify anything. What happened, happened and no one involved in it (or before it) is alive. The remaining thoughts, documents, writings and hand-me-downs are all that is left.
The only thing I question is the suggestion that those 2/3 of people across the south who did not own slaves actually avidly supported the system.
Oh please. Tariffs on imported Machinery suited Northern Interests at the expense of Southern Interests. (It raised the costs of their competition.) No Tariffs on imported agricultural products also suited Northern Interests at the expense of Southern Interests.
They consistently kept their thumb on the legislative scale in ways that always suited the financial interests of the North, but did not suit the financial interests of the South.
