> this sounds more planned than it actually was. I think that the
> general perspective of Barrington Moore (SOCIAL ORIGINS OF
> DICTATORSHIP AND DEMOCRACY) makes sense here. The very-different
> socio-economic systems of the Northeast and the South meant that there
> as a lack of communication between the two, so that economic conflicts
> (over protectionism and the like, including slavery) became more and
> more salient. (BTW, most of the South's trade was with England, not
> with the North.) The Northern coalition included a lot of different
> people with different goals and issues, including the abolition of
> slavery. But it unified around keeping the union intact (Lincoln's
> program). In the South, as some historians have argued, the issue of
> slavery was much more important. Just a _hint_ of Northern
> anti-slavery sentiment was enough to cause the slave-owners to become
> unhinged.
If you look at the declarations issued by the initial founding states of the Confederacy it's pretty clear that slavery was the primary motivating factor for their secession. Other states joined later for different reasons (albeit they were all slave states, a not unimportant detail). The North wasn't as concerned with the issue of slavery per se as with keeping the country together. So it is true to say that the *war* didn't start over slavery, but it's harder to argue that *secession* didn't.