Our problem is that the answer is "yes" and "no". George, if slavery didn't exist in the United States (not just in the Southern states) in the 1850s, where's the source of contention? There is no conflict over the Kansas Territory, no novel titled "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to inflame Northern public opinion, no debate over States Rights in the territories, no split in the Whig and Democratic parties. For that matter, there's no Republican party. There's no reason for John Brown to be angry, no attack on Harpers Ferry, no arms build-up in Southern states and no secession conventions because Lincoln was simply a failed candidate for the U.S. Senate, not a winner of a national presidential election.

Finally, no slavery = no Civil War.

As Alabama Congressman James L. Pugh told Captain Oates in 1863, "If we free the negroes to make soldiers of them, that is simply throwing aside the bone of contention, and we had as well stop the war at once." Oates, p. 497.

What about the opposite side of the coin, the position you take? Without negating any of the points made above, Captain Oates in his reply to Pugh stated it properly.

Such a proclamation, "That the war was being fought alone for slavery," would have caused a disbandment of the armies. The soldiers could not have been held together. The men would have laid down their arms and gone home.

The brave men who filled the ranks of Confederate armies volunteered to fight for home-rule, local self-government, for seperate national independence with the institution of slavery as an important incident of the struggle [italics added]. . . . The chief advocates and agitators of secession were largely of that class [wealthy planters], but a great majority of the soldiers in the ranks -- the men who handled the muskets and did the killing -- were not of that class. p. 498

Could anyone have stated your position better? Yet Oates goes on to make the exact same points that JakeO has repeated about attempts in Congress to arm the slaves and belated passage of legislation just weeks before the war ended. He has more to say about why poor white men ("those who never owned a slave") fought to the bitter end, but posting that paragraph just about shut down this message board a few years back.

Truth is, the war 'was' and 'was not' about slavery. Both sides have strong basis in fact, and denial of either side-- yours or his -- repudiates history.