Invariably, in any discussion about the Civil War, slavery, secession, and other such issues, some apologist for the Confederate cause will interrupt to give us some scholarly argument about how the Civil war wasn’t really about slavery, but was the result of historical, political, economic or constitutional questions that had not been fully decided by the time the nation arrived in the 1860s.
Yes, we’ve heard the same arguments right here on the Zone. I won’t embarrass the perpetrators by quoting them directly.

I know when I was in high school, these arguments were frequently brought up in our history and Civics classes. We were regaled with stories about how Robert E Lee owned no slaves, but Ulysses S Grant did, and how Lincoln’s main aim was never to repeal slavery, but to preserve the Union. The unspoken implication to all this was that the South had no quarrel with their colored folks, they took very good care of them, it was just a slander perpetrated by the Yankees to justify the War of Northern Aggression.

And of course, the point was frequently made how slavery was “really not all that bad”. After all, slaves were valuable property, like livestock or farm machinery, it was bad business to mistreat them. They were well fed, clothed and housed, never mistreated or over-worked. They were provided with Christian religious instruction; and although rarely mentioned outright, it was implied how their genetic heritage was continuously being upgraded by rape from their owners.!

It was also frequently pointed out that the economic justifications for plantation agriculture
were rapidly disappearing and slavery was on the way out anyway, for real business reasons (the only form of logic or morality these people ever seem to take seriously). I guess that made its continuation for as long as possible perfectly acceptable.

The true point being being made, the lie we were being indoctrinated with and which survives unmodified to this day, was that Southerners were fighting for a noble cause, freedom as they perceived it, not merely because some dumb-ass Crackers were too lazy to pick their own cotton, or too cheap to pay someone a free market wage to do it.

Well, the Confederate apologists are not just wrong, they are lying. There may be other underlying causes to the Civil War, no war is ever about just one issue, but slavery is the cause that precipitated this conflict. It is how State governments justified treason to themselves and their citizens, even though the vast bulk of them, especially those who actually fought and died, were, for the most part, highly unlikely to ever have accumulated enough land or capital to justify owning their own slaves. Southerners fought for freedom, all right, the freedom to get rich off another’s labor, and the freedom to exploit, buy and sell human beings like cattle and to breed them like animals.

If you can’t accept that, look up the Declarations of Secession of the individual States of the Confederacy. Here’s the one for South Carolina, the first to declare itself in rebellion, and the first to initiate hostilities against an American military unit at Fort Sumter.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp

Execute a “find” on this dataset for the text string “slave”. It appears 18 times, either by itself, or as part of “slavery” or “slaveholding”.

This obscenity was adopted by the State of South Carolina on Christmas Eve, 1860.

Now, explain to me again how the Civil War wasn’t about slavery.