This is typical of the PC Revisionists here.
Very much on point.
After the North largely completed its campaign of gradual emancipation, selling its slaves to Southern owners at full market value, i.e. ethnic cleansing; the recently interred Whigs rebranded as Republicans and found an issue to divide the nation, and the Democrat party, enabling them to win power as a minority.
Something their revisionist history does not explain is why African Americans are overwhelmingly Democrats. Revisionists cannot explain why they abandoned, nay ran away from, the Republican party.
Nor can the Revisionists explain why one of the shortest, if not the shortest list of books, is a list of gushing praise biographies by Black authors.
Nor can they explain the scarcity of statements in praise of Lincoln before he died, was immaculated, sainted, and entombed in a memorial fashioned after the Parthenon in Athens, fit for a Greek God. To find a statement favorable to Lincoln while he was alive, they seem to reach for Frederick Douglass, 1876 eulogizing dead Lincoln.
Southerners have always been conservative. When the Democratic party was overrun by liberals, conservative Southern Democrats switched party affiliation to Republican. The Southerners did not change, the Democratic party did.
Frederick Douglass, writing of the Emancipation Proclamation, said, "it may be fairly questioned, whether it did not chill the Union ardour of the loyal people of the North in some degree, and diminish, rather than increase, the sum of our power against the rebellion: for moderate, cautious and guarded as was this proclamation, it created a howl of indignation and wrath amongst the rebels and their allies. The old cry was raised by the copperhead organs of “an abolition war,” and a pretext was thus found for an excuse for refusing to enlist, and for marshalling all the negro prejudice of the North on the rebel side. Men could say they were willing to fight for the Union, but that they were not willing to fight for the freedom of the negroes; and thus it was made difficult to procure enlistments or to enforce the draft."
If it were an abolition war from the outset, how to explain this reaction?
Indeed, if the war were started to abolish slavery, and had the Union been successful at the first Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas), and proceeded to overrun Virginia, capture Jefferson Davis, and secure an unconditional surrender of the Confederate states, the war would have been over in a day. The slaves would still have been slaves, and there would have been no possibility of a war measure authorizing their seizure as contraband, with subsequent freeing by their new owner. The Union would have been preserved, but with the peculiar institution. In a war to abolish slavery, immediate and total victory at war would not have produced that result.
The whole "about slavery" narrative was nothing but propaganda put forth after the fact so they could tell the families of all those voters in the North who had family members maimed and killed that they had had a moral cause all along. They didn't dare tell them the truth which is that they started a war for money and empire at the behest of their corporate supporters which they thought was going to be a cakewalk, but which instead turned into a bloodbath. Nobody wants to hear their son or father or brother was killed so that some corporate fatcat could line his pockets even more than he already had.