I have researched it for a long time. A Few years ago I had little interest in the subject, but people informed me of some things that didn't make any sense. The more I looked at it, the less sense it made, and so then I started to see that there was much more to this story than I had originally been told.
I agree that there were monetary interests involved, but they were on both sides. It is true that political power was in play, but one side was using men as slaves to prop up their power.
Both sides were using slaves to prop up their political power. Where do you think that 200 million dollars per year that was funneling through New York came from?
The initial objection from Washington DC was not that the Federal revenues were produced by slaves, it was that those Federal revenues were going to cease. Likewise the middleman fees the businesses of New York were charging for handling all of that Southern shipping were not concerned that the money was coming from slaves, they were concerned that the money was going to stop coming.
As Charles Dickens noted at the time:
"So the case stands, and under all the passion of the parties and the cries of battle lie the two chief moving causes of the struggle. Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this, as of many other evils. The quarrel between the North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel."
Charles Dickens added to this in 1862:
Every reasonable creature may know, if willing, that the North hates the Negro, and until it was convenient to make a pretense that sympathy with him was the cause of the War, it hated the Abolitionists and derided them up hill and down dale. For the rest, there's not a pins difference between the two parties. They will both rant and lie and fight until they come to a compromise; and the slave may be thrown into that compromise or thrown out, just as it happens."
Sumter meant nothing to the South except as a prize of their secessionist desires.
Northern Newspapers had already urged that the guns of Ft Sumter be turned upon Charleston to force them to collect Federal tariffs.
Philadelphia Press, January 15, 1861
"It would be proper, we suppose, to prohibit coast-wise trade to and from the ports of South Carolina, whilst she is in her present attitude of armed defiance of the United States. In the enforcement of the revenue laws, the forts become of primary importance. Their guns cover just so much ground as is necessary to enable the United States to enforce their laws."
That fort commanded the entrance to their primary trading port, and if it was thought that foreign shipping might be fired upon, it would damage their potential to market and ship their product.
Continued US presence in the entrance to their harbor constituted a defacto loss of trade for them. There would be a recurring monetary loss so long as it continued.
Slavery was the evil in our country and God took the final drop of blood in payment for that evil through the war.
He started off his negotiations with the South by offering them what everyone claims they wanted. He offered them permanent slavery.
If slavery was all that they wanted, they would have taken that deal. What they wanted was economic independence from Washington DC. Lincoln would let them have permanent slavery (which they already had in the Union) but he would *NOT* let them be independent of the Control of Washington DC.
There were truly evil men in the South who did incredibly horrible things to other men, all in the name of their pride and sin. If the North had a sin, it was greed, if the South had a sin, it was thinking they were gods among men who could kill at their whim.
I can deal with greed, I cannot deal with a man who thinks he is a god with the power of life and death. And the leading families in the South thought just that.
As for Lincoln, read the book “Fifty Years in the Church of Rome.” Lincoln was playing for time because slavery and the ideals of slavery were already dying. With automation and newer replacements for cotton, slavery was becoming economically unfeasible. It would have died anyway. Lincoln did not want to take the USA down with it.
If you truly believe all this, why are you still here? Go somewhere else.