Could it be this simple?
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!
How 'bout this simple?
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.
As a great Southerner once said; "Simple is as simple does."
These aren't improvements over what most of us were taught in school, they're a great leap backward from the beginnings of complexity to a dead-end oversimplification, from first encountering actual sources to relying on retrospective imaginings. In 1860 more Americans were probably more concerned about competition from slave masters and slave labor than about mill owners or capitalists, and they believed that they would have had great reason for concern had the Confederacy won. It does seem strange to take the socialist tack against free labor to defend the Confederacy, ... but I forgot, slavery doesn't enter into the picture at all.
I'll notify Jim Rob of your insistence that he shut Freeper down at once.