If the preservation of slavery was the only (or even the most important) matter at stake during the American CW, then slave owners wouldn't have almost anyone to fight for their cause in the confederate army. How many of the "greys" actually kept slaves? How many of them were tenants, single farmers and artisans, denied of a scarcely remedied living by the unfair competition of slave owners? The pieces of the puzzle don't really fit in, do they?

The abolition of slavery was the perfect battle flag for the Lincoln administration to rally the yanquies to fight their fellow Americans of the southern states. Not to make of the negroes equal citizens, oh no! It would have to come the Year of Our Lord 2008 to see one of them elected president - and a damn lousy one at that! No... the real purpose was to annihilate the state's self-governance, as it was meant by the nation founders, the constitution signers, several of them from the south. No state was to leave the union even if it was massively voted for! No state was to escape the federal rule over the most unsuspected and particular matters of their citizens. No federal law was to be proposed and voted by the states (as actual union members) but by the HR and the Senate. That's what, in my view, the American CW was all about.