Rethinking my Pithy Civil War pronouncements

20 years ago when I said the civil war was about slavery like the Iraq was was about WMD. I actually said this in an internship interview, which suggests the young invincible naive arrogant stage of development I was in at the time. I was trying to be clever. Not surprisingly I did not get the internship, but it wasn't all bad. The organizations leader referred me to another internship opportunity with a man who would go on to be one of the worst NBA GMs of all time (true story). I didn't take it. 


When I made  the statement, my implication was that the Civil war was fought for territorial control reasons. These amount to naked power grabs that are difficult to rally public support, but the question of slavery drew support to both sides of the war so it became the rhetoric at the time of the war, and then because of the emancipation proclamation, it because the historical narrative as well.


I then compared this to the modern Iraq war which was also a question of exerting political dominion over an area, and political figures utilized the issue of preventing WMD to garner popular support for the war.


I have come to see that logic as painted with too broad of strokes. It now seems clear to me that the South was blatantly fighting a war to maintain the practice of slavery, which would appear to make my statement completely false. However despite the post war narrative that Abraham Lincoln and the north fought a war to liberate the black slaves from bandage, that also is not true. While the south was fighting to ensure the institution of slavery prevailed, the north was not actually fighting to liberate slaves, it was explicitly fighting to “preserve the Union” which means to maintain central governmental control over the southern states that were attempting to secede. 
But that means that slavery was used as a convenient justification for armed subjugation of territory for political aims by the Northern States, just like Weapons of mass destruction. So I was kind of right, but I was right in a way that had worse implications.

So “Yes” the south was fighting to keep slavery, but “No” the north was not fighting to free the slaves. Black people get the shaft going both ways.