Was the Civil War really about Economic Oppression from the North?

Visiting the Lincoln memorial yesterday, I was reminded of this essay: a scathing rebuttal to the movement of historical revisionism in some conservative or libertarian circles to paint Lincoln as not our greatest leader, but, of all things, a tyrant bent on Southern oppression.

The general thesis of this movement is that the Civil War was all about economic oppression, that slavery was ancillary to Lincoln's true moral concerns, and that the whole conflict could could have been avoided.

This argument has always stuck in my mind due to a personal experience at a young age. Now, I went to high school in Indianapolis, IN -- not the South -- but sufficiently rural enough to have Southern sympathizers. The kid who I first heard this argument from at lunch during freshman year of high school, was, despite his upbringing north of the Mason-Dixon Line, a contemporary Southern sympathizer. More than a few of our fellow students were well. His views -- that Lincoln was a tyrant, WWII intervention was a mistake, and that Coolidge was our greatest President (I am not kidding) filtered through them, and I saw them come up again and again through our four years of high school, especially during the build-up to the 2008 election as this group coalesced around Ron Paul. This line of thinking has come to serve in my mind as indicative conservative intellectual degeneracy, the tattered remnants of a once respectable movement.

As the Ape Man/Chieftain of Seir points out (also see here), even a cursory examination of the primary literature of the time reveals the argument that the Civil War was not about slavery to be ridiculous. Indeed, slavery appears to be central to discourse of the Civil War in a way scarcely imaginable in our time.

Nonetheless, I have to admit that, when first presented with this argument in my freshman year of high school, not by an article or book but by a classmate, I was somewhat beguiled... What if the traditional narrative we had been spoon fed since we were kids wasn't the whole story? What if it was all a lie.

The lesson, of course, is that takes constant vigilance to see what is in front of your own eyes. WAR IS NOT PEACE, FREEDOM IS NOT SLAVERY, and the South most certainly fought the North over slavery.