That is two late 20th century historians' view.
You could find a few people who thought that way in Charleston or New Orleans, but it wasn't that widespread. Plenty of secessionists, like Senator Wigfall, were more than content with a Confederacy that remained permanently agrarian and supplied cotton to Europe in exchange for manufactured goods. If the South had really wanted more industry, it would have had more industry.
The fact that the Corwin Amendment was offered as well as the fact that Lincoln made it perfectly clear on numerous occasions that he had no desire to threaten slavery as well as the complete lack of political support for abolition in the North all make it clear that slavery simply was not threatened in the US.
Do you believe everything politicians say? When Obama said that he was against gay marriage, did you believe him? Politicians promise things - maybe sincerely, maybe not. What actually happens, though, may not be what was promised. Events have a momentum of their own, and politicians have so many commitments that one may override the others. There are always enough people who fear what may happen that politicians' promises are never entirely believed or trusted.
Had the protection of slavery rather than economics been the main concern, the Southern states could have had that for the asking.
The truth is more like the opposite. Southerners could achieve much of what they wanted economically if they put their minds to making shrewd alliances and deals, but they could never be sure that Northerners would remain friendly to the institution of slavery.
That is two late 20th century historians’ view.
You could find a few people who thought that way in Charleston or New Orleans, but it wasn’t that widespread. Plenty of secessionists, like Senator Wigfall, were more than content with a Confederacy that remained permanently agrarian and supplied cotton to Europe in exchange for manufactured goods. If the South had really wanted more industry, it would have had more industry.
Oh I disagree. There were plenty of Southerners who recognized that industrialization was the way forward. They could hardly have failed to notice it by the mid 19th century. Senator Wigfall’s view was definitely a minority view by that point.
I certainly know better than to take politicians at their word. Nevertheless, Lincoln had never said he had any intention of threatening slavery. Abolitionists routinely got drubbed in election after election in the Northern states. Even if there had been a lot of political support for it, without the consent of the slaveholding states it would have been impossible to get rid of. It takes 3/4s of the states to pass a constitutional amendment and there were 15 states that still had slavery. Ergo, any move to abolish slavery would have required their consent.....ergo, they would have been able to get a generous compensated emancipation scheme as had been done in other countries that abolished slavery at that time to ensure they did not take a huge financial loss....just as the Northern states’ gradual emancipation schemes gave slaveowners in their states ample time to dispose of their slave property to ensure they didn’t take a huge financial loss.
They could be reasonably sure at least for the intermediate term that Northern business interests would remain amenable to slavery considering the enormous profits they were making from servicing goods produced at least in part by slave labor. As I’ve outlined above, had Northern sentiment hardened against slavery, the slaveholding states could have extracted a lot of money via a compensated emancipation scheme in order to get rid of it....which seems only appropriate given that it was Northerners who sold the slaves in the first place making a hefty profit in the process.
This.
Just as liberals today are offended by memorials to southerners Lee, Jackson, Davis and others, northerners in the mid-1800s were offended by the limited constitutional government created by Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Mason - all southerners.
Southerners had an agrarian culture that competed with northern love-of-money culture. Then, as now, northerners looked down on southerners. And northerners were jealous of southern successes.
Initially in the young united States of America, all 13 states were slave states. Time passed and northern accountants discovered slavery was not a good economic business model for industry but that it seemed to work for their economic and political rivals in the South. Ten seconds later Puritans in the North announced slavery was morally wrong.
So, northerners decided to destroy their political and economic rivals in the South and overthrow the pro-slavery U.S. Constitution. And war came.