I think you’re not understanding a few fundamental premises/contextual things. Assuming you’re arguing in good faith, I’ll add:
- The Republican Party was formed, in part, to limit the expansion of slavery to western territories of the United States and preserve the West for white, free labour.
- Southerners understood this to be attempt to strangle slavery. If the expansion of slavery to massive new western territories was limited, it would ring the death knell and the end of ‘Slave Power’ (the democratic stranglehold that slave owners and their northern allies in the Democratic Party had over American politics)
- The election of Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, in 1860 was a signal to slave owning elites across the South that the Republicans could forge electoral majorities that could defeat Slave Power. If they didn’t secede from the United States, the Republicans and millions of white immigrants from Europe who would go to the western territories would outnumber them greater than 4:1 which existed by 1860.
- Alex Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.”
- South Carolina secession declaration: “A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.”
Let me know if you want more information.
GOP was anti slavary party.
It was also a big government party descendant from the Whig party and at the time the big business corporate party and big government, whereas Democrat party at the time was the small limited government party that was classically liberal.
The southern states literally had almost rebelled over the tarrif of abominations as they were called in 1828, and Jackson was a democrat president who didn't even support them.
You look at the events, the southern states did not want tarrifs as they relied economically on european imports, whereas the northern states used them to boost their own industrial base. So you had the internal conflict.
Tarrif of abominations pushed the tarriffs to 38% and the southern states refused to pay and literally drafted a letter of secession that they didn't deliver. Jackson struck first sent the US army down and initiated a compromise. This was the Nullification crisis there was legitimately almost a open civil war, with the same states, led by South Carolina, again.
Lincoln ran on a open platform of reinstating the tarriffs that almost caused a War with Jackson a Democrat president. This is important, he did not run on a platform of ending slavary, his big platform was restoration of the tariffs. This is what caused lincoln to be removed by some southern states from the ballot. Thats how contentious this was.
Then what happens, Lincoln gets in office and raises the tariffs. The southern states that already were itching to leave and mad about the tariffs before hand that they were about to leave the union when a Democratic president that was friendly to them was in office and actively working to reduce the tariffs, had it and left. South Carolina kicks off the war again, at Ft. Sumter, a tariff collection site and things begin again and escalate even further.
Again after the southern states leave what is issued by the US government, the Corwin Amendment, stating that slavery will continue in the US unbothered in perpetuity of the US's existance.
That alone tells me and is supported by history and documented that the civil war was not about slavary, no more than Vietnam was about saving the south vietnamese democracy, Desert Storm was about saving Kuwait, OEF wasn't about 9/11, Afghanistan wasn't about bin ladin, and etc.
Thats my stance supported by history.
