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The American civil war wasn’t about slavery.
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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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Confidently Incorrect
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When people are way too smug about their wrong answer.
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Yes, the reasons lie somewhere between "it wasn't about it" and "it was only about it". Slavery was a major issue of course but a deeper feeling of cultural separation was under it. The nation back then wasn't nearly as federal as it is now, it was much more a collection of states and people felt that way. Gen Lee always said his loyalty was first to Virginia, he didn't say the US and not the Confederacy. The north was much more industrialized and the south much more rural. Also slaves were expensive and you had a southern elite of wealthy landowners who owned the vast majority of slaves who had much more to lose from abolition than the average poor white person. In fact West Virginia broke away and Tennessee remained mostly neutral because the people in the mountainous areas rarely had slaves. When states became free or slave then it became a matter of whether new states should be free or slave states, further fanning the fires. "Bleeding Kansas" was a mini civil war before the civil war. The wealthy southern landowners saw every free state as a step towards abolition, others saw it as a threat to state's rights by an increasingly powerful federal gov. Ironically the cotton gin actually increased the demand for slaves instead of reducing it.
The war wasn't always popular in the north, especially early on and you had vicious draft riots in NYC and a Massachusetts unit was viciously attacked while passing through Baltimore.
I'll add to your comment on the Emancipation Proclamation that Lincoln also wanted to make the war more than just about reuniting the nation and for a higher cause. He also wanted to make it clear to the now abolitionist British that siding with the Confederates (the British were big consumers of southern cotton) would put them on the wrong side.
Just to clarify, the union then was MUCH more federal (small "f")--the power was more divided between states and Washington. What we always call the Federal government they often called the National or General government since federal rule inherently has regional governments.
The Civil War, while not about States' Rights in the sense neo-Confederates claim, did weaken the states, though the 16th and 17th Amendments and the New Deal really did them in. It's hard for our generation to conceive of every topic not being a national issue.