“As much as both Lincoln and modern Confederacy apologists try to say otherwise, the Civil War was ultimately about the suppression of slavery.”
Nonsense. The Civil War was about the southern oligarchy wanting to stay the biggest fish in their pond by making the pond smaller. They did treason to the constitution, the nation, and the American Revolution to do it.
I’m not sure that we are disagreeing. Lincoln claimed that his goal was to save the Union, and that slavery wasn’t the reason for the war. Modern apologists for the Confederacy also claim that the war wasn’t about slavery (usually with some bizarre claim that the South was more libertarian than the North). But the Confederate states were quite explicit about why they were leaving–fear that their right to hold slaves was going to be interfered with by Lincoln. And Lincoln would not have had to fight the Civil War if the Confederacy didn’t leave over slavery.
