Most liberals don't believe that the flag that flew off the stern of slave ships was the Stars and Stripes and not the Stars and Bars. The Portuguese were the biggest slave traders and the Spanish and the British. Yankee cotton mills depended on the slave trade and whaling ships were converted to slave ships. The Confederacy only existed for about four or five years but slavery went on in the New World for two hundred.
The US ended the slave trade in 1807. Not many slaves came in on US flagged ships
By 1861, most of the civilized nations of the world had outlawed slavery
The Confederacy thought it was a good idea to create a nation dedicated to slavery.
More like a nation dedicated to its bottom line. Slaves made sure that bottom line held firm.
But, they are inextricable. That is the reason that Marxists can claim it was economic (not that everyone who say this is a Marxist!) and States-Rightistists can claim their thing (not that everyone who says this is racist!), and then 'liberals' (whatever that can mean) can claim humanitarianism and an end to the suffering of the poor slaves (who, it must after all be admitted, would not have been greatly better off materially if born in Africa!).
The economy of the South had slavery as the foundation. Any threat to that was a threat to absolutely everything.
In "Gone With the Wind", we are propagandized into a conception of a beautiful, sophisticated, gentile South, full of elegance and grace and manners and taste. Of course they wanted to hold on to that. Their religion upheld them, with instructions on how to treat slaves found in their Bible and never condemned there. Nature, as they identified it, determined that the 'lesser' existed to be used by the 'superior'.
Seen from their side, the intrusion from the industrializing rest of a nation that they had transcended on the level of national defense and other common causes, was now an encumbrance. Better to be shed of it and make their own deals with the British and French (who, while having long ago prohibited slavery had no qualms about profiting from it).
The spirit of the time was ready to accept enormous change in America, but not the dissolution of America. Slavery was not the main motivation, certainly at the start of hostilities, for most of the Northern volunteers. It was America.
For the common Southerner, is was not about slaves, either. It was Virginia, or Georgia, etc. The patriotic devotion was to the little state, not the grand. None below the Mason-Dixon line seem to have a vision for a grand future. The rich Southerners were as the rich ever are, reactionary and back-looking. The farmers saw only their acreage.
The national economy was trying to manage the balance of payment in trade with Europe. The South was seriously upsetting this.
Thus, the equivalent of our "1%ers" back then, on both sides, had an interest in bidding the poor sheeple go die for them and their economies.
So, was the war over slavery?
Perhaps.
Was the war because of slavery?
Effectively, yes.
Were there other important elements?
And how!
