Your command of US history is not so good -- the Emancipation Proclamation was made late in the war. The argument when the war started was about escaped saves; the Northern states were ignoring federal law and asserting state's rights to free them.
Right. The proclamation was made after the civil war started. But the war was because the North started to act as if it no longer agreed with slavery, which the South saw as a threat, since it depended so much on it. Lincoln promised that slavery would not be allowed in new territories, the south states saw the writing on the wall, and that caused the war. Yeah, the United States didn't exactly quit cold turkey before the war but close enough I think.
>>[1] The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states. When Abraham Lincoln won election in 1860 as the first Republican president on a platform pledging to keep slavery out of the territories, seven slave states in the deep South seceded and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America. <<
>>[1] The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states. When Abraham Lincoln won election in 1860 as the first Republican president on a platform pledging to keep slavery out of the territories, seven slave states in the deep South seceded and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America. <<
[1]http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/faq/?referrer=http...