“The war was not about slavery.”
I know.. :-) It was a rhetorical question..
You and I are apparently among the few people on FR who understand that Northern aggression simply could not have been motivated by slavery.
After two centuries, why would the North suddenly wage a costly and tragic war over the issue of slavery at that particular time?
No, the issue of slavery was an after-the-fact justification for an unjustifiable war against the southern states.
It was a justification then and it is a justification now.
It was a justification then and it is a justification now.
This is what I learned when I finally started looking at it. Slavery is a smoke screen for what actually happened.
Not a justification; a convenient rationalization.
The PC Revisionists don't want you to ever consider Northern motivations - only Southern ones. That is of course so they can always be on Offense and never on Defense. They don't want you to look at the fact that the North was benefitting massively from grossly unequal tax and trade policies AND that they sought to tilt those policies even further toward their benefit until they became positively rapacious. The North did not care about slavery. Why would they? They were the ones who had sold the slaves in the first place. They were the ones getting all that lovely money from tariffs/trade paid for by goods produced at least in part by slave labor. They definitely did not want that to stop. If anything, they wanted an even bigger slice of the profits. That's why the very first thing they offered up was slavery forever by express constitutional amendment. What they made sure not to offer was any reduction in tariffs or equality of federal expenditures for infrastructure or corporate subsidies.
Suddenly? Concern about slavery had been growing for years. At first people took slavery for granted. Then they assumed it would disappear with time. Then slaveowners started to believe that slavery was a positive good that should be expanded. At the same time, many people felt it was an evil to be combatted. To believe that people only opposed slavery because they wanted to destroy the slave states is to lack what people back then called the "moral sense."