In a word, GREED
Yep. The greed of the slave power.
Typical CSA apologist dodge.
Walt
Nope. The greed of the Eastern Whig/Republican Millocracy, to take private the national agenda the way their antecedents had ramrodded and bullsteered the ratification of the Constitution of 1787. The greed of the industrialists and their bankers in the East Coast money centers, to strip the continent of its wealth and work its immigrants into the dirt for 15 cents a day.
That couldn't happen, with the old, agrarian, Jacksonian America standing in the day. So.....pick an issue, what issue will do, boys, to split the West off from the South? Oh, I know! Slavery! Let's throw our weight behind that Lincoln fellow, he's spoiling for a fight with the Sothrons. He'll get us where we need to go!
Not to mention the greed of the mercantilists who used force to "free" the slaves (as long as they don't come up here) and to establish a "more perfect union, of the corporations, by the corporations, and FOR the corporations", which, by the way, we still have today.