Ah, the Civil War, perennial source of embarrassment for the more doctrinaire libertarian. Like most things, we’re tempted to try to see it in stark contrasts of black and white, good and evil. Slavery is downplayed by some so that Lincoln’s tyrannical measures can be accentuated. Slavery is cast center stage by others so that Lincoln’s tyranny can safely be excused.
Like most real history, the truth is more shades of gray than anything else.
In truth, slavery really was the main, fundamental cause of the sectional split that ultimately culminated in the Civil War. A slave-based, agricultural economy was pitted in the halls of the Federal government against a wage-labor based, industrial and commercial economy. The Civil War happened when it did simply because the elites of the slave-based economy were slowly losing power. You can see most easily on Wikipedia, of all places. Go to the first presidential election of 1789 and look at the map they have showing how each state voted. Move forward to the next election. Then the next. While some elections do almost look like they fall along the Mason-Dixon split that would almost define the Civil War, it is only in 1860 when the first President is elected who only received votes from Northern states, in an election where the combined total of the remaining candidates electoral votes still did not outweigh those of Lincoln. They were losing power and they knew it, so they took the drastic step they felt was necessary.
But, although slavery is central to the wider context of the Civil War, abolitionism was not. New Englanders (and their colonial descendants in up-state New York, northern Pennsylvania, and around the Great Lakes) WERE particularly passionate about abolition for morality’s sake and for religious reasons. New England’s Puritan Congregationalist heritage practically demanded the immediate and irrevocable abolition of the peculiar institution. But New England Puritans weren’t the only northerners. The more cosmopolitan (but at this time still predominantly German descended) inhabitants of southern Pennsylvania, for instance, didn’t see such a demand in their Lutheran religion. In fact, some were tentative supporters of slavery, the better to keep the black man from competing with his labor. The same story played out in the Ohio River Valley parts of Ohio and Indiana, which had been settled by Virginian veterans of the original Revolution. The Dutch commercial and landed elite of New York’s Hudson Valley found slavery to be among the most natural of human institutions, second only to the neo-feudalism some of them still practiced on the rentiers who worked their land.
The same story of shades is on display in the South. While the preservation of slavery was no doubt forefront in the minds of Sun Belt politicians from South Carolina and Georgia, the more northerly Southern states of the old Virginian Domain, as well as North Carolina and her daughter, Tennessee, hesitated in breaking the bonds of the Union over such an issue as their slaves. Only the mobilization of the Northern military finally thrust Virginia and the rest of the Upper South which looked to her for moral guidance into the arms of the Confederacy. Religion played a similarly important role in the South as it did in the North: High Church Anglican blue-bloods on the Virginia Tidewater were almost as great firebrands as their fellow religionists in South Carolina. Low Church Anglicans out in what was once frontier country, however, needed a sign from the Federal government that the sacred trust of the Constitution had truly been abandoned before they would secede. In Kentucky, even the raising of a Federal Army with the intent of suppressing the rebelling states was not enough, and an intra-state civil war was fought to decide the question. Maryland and Delaware may well have followed the rest of the Upper South had it not been for Federal troops keeping them in line.
So, was the ultimate, root cause of the split slavery? Yes.
Were there a million other issues that motivated the hundreds of thousands of individual actors who had roles on this grand stage of history. Undoubtedly.
Did Lincoln and men under Lincoln’s authority engage in heinous acts that any right minded liberal should be horrified at? Yes.
Was it worth it to give freedom to millions of enslaved Americans? Definitely.
Sometimes there are no good choices or perfect solutions to the dilemmas life presents us with.