This may be the stupidest thread ever. You guys just want to believe whatever reinforces your biases. It's not just that it's one interpretation and point of view. It's that it leaves out key facts and ignores things in order to come to a specific conclusion.
The Republican Party was conceived and born of Whig abolitionists. Alvan Bovay, Salmon Chase, Charles Sumner, Horace Greeley, and Amos Tuck were all completely unambiguous and outspoken abolitionists whose central purpose in forming a new party was specifically to fight the Kansas-Nebraska Act which upended the Missouri Compromise, and opened up all the Western Territories to slavery, which they believe had to be stopped at all costs. Turns out there were right, though you can also argue that they were working to cause Bleeding Kansas and the troubles out West to contain Slavery and prevent it's expansion. All of them entered this new party with the intention of containing and slowly eliminating slavery. None of them advocated a war to end slavery. They wanted to choke it out of existence, and in the ensuing years they certainly used every tool available to them to do that, including policies they believed would hasten it's demise. It really WAS a War of Northern Aggression because of that, and I agree that The South was more reacting to that aggression. So there we agree. What you can't argue is why they formed the Republican Party, because all of them gave speeches and wrote extensively about it being an abolitionist party from it's inception and how slavery should not exist in a country founded upon liberty as both an intellectual and a moral imperative.
So while you can say that the South reacted to the North's aggression and hostile legislation, what you can't say is that the North wasn't doing all that because of slavery when the Republican party was made up of abolitionists who wanted to end slavery and who wrote about it, read about it, and heard it from the pulpit and in the pews every Sunday. They were soaked in it, and a large portion of them were fanatics about it, unlike the South were the people fanatical about slavery were probably the smallest segment of society.
Perspective and facts, but not perspective alone. To say it was about economics and not slavery when so much of the South's economy was contingent on the lowest cost labor possible is obtuse. About as close to that as you can get is to say that for the average Southern Soldier the war WAS about sovereignty and a Federal Government they felt was out of control regardless of their views on slavery, which were probably more along the lines that it was part of the human condition going all the way back to prehistory (which would have been correct). What you can't say is that the average Union soldier didn't care about the issue of slavery (especially if they were Republicans). This to the point of John Brown, a violent criminal executed for insurrection against that Federal Government, of being elevated into a hero through abolitionist propaganda.
By saying that the war wasn't about slavery you are pretty much picking the perspective one side without considering the other. Even the slave holding Founding Fathers knew and wrote about the problem of slavery and it's incompatibility with the ideas and morality of their high minded Republic. John Q. Adams even called slavery the coming "Last Battle of the American Revolution".
