DiogenesLamp: "Not the Union.
So long as they were sucking up the profits from all that slave money, they were going to keep it going."
Total nonsense.
From Day One in 1787, nearly all Northerners were committed to abolishing slavery in their own states, and to accepting it in the South where it was already legal.
The issue in 1860 was whether Federal Government could abolish slavery in Western territories and continue to allow abolition in the North despite the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision.
Sure, a few abolitionists (i.e., John Brown) wanted abolition in the South, but they were far from the majority and not part of Lincoln's 1860 Republican platform.
Northerners' reasons for accepting slavery in the South had nothing to do with its profitability, or lack of, but rather with their commitment to the Constitutional compromises engineered in 1787.
They well understood that attempting to abolish slavery in the South would lead directly to disunion and likely war, which of course they didn't want.
As President Lincoln's First Inaugural (March 4, 1861) said, Southerners could not have war unless they themselves started it.
Which they soon did.
Do you think the power masters of the New York elite gave a crap what the general public thought?
Don't be naive. The people that mattered wanted that 200 million dollars per year.