this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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When people are way too smug about their wrong answer.
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It's, I think, sort of true that the Civil War wasn't always going to necessarily mean the end of slavery if the north won.
It started as a war to keep the union together, and initially a lot of people in the north thought that it would end quickly and that the states would return to the union and give up their rebellion.
However, as time went on and the losses started to pile up, it became clear to Lincoln and the other northern leaders that a war with this much bloodshed must end the slavery debate for good. That is why Lincoln ultimately wrote and delivered the Emancipation Proclamation.
But it's a point that's splitting a lot of hairs and very nuanced, because the Civil War started when pro-slavery states seceded from the union because they were afraid that a president elected without consent from any of the southern states might move to eliminate slavery...so summarily, the Civil War was definitely about slavery from beginning to end.
TL;DR: The Civil War was about slavery.
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.