[bscphil]

As I said in a comment cousin to this one, the reasons that Lincoln entered the war aren't equivalent to "the reason the war happened". What you call the "cause" of the war depends on what level you're looking at.

The direct cause of the war was the Fort Sumter altercation.

The reason the Fort Sumter event occurred was that both sides were angling hard for a war they thought they could easily win.

The reason the Union wanted to fight the war was (mostly) that its leaders had strong political inclinations and economic incentives to reject the right of the Southern states to secede, and to use military force if necessary to maintain the union.

The reason the South seceded was primarily that they believed (mostly wrongly) that the North wanted to end slave ownership, which they viewed as both economically destructive and a violation of their rights.

While it's technically true that the story is more complicated than just "the war was fought over slavery", that doesn't change the fact that the existence of slavery was the most significant point of strife in the run-up to the war. But for slavery, the war would not have happened. There are few, possibly no other institutions in the America of the 1850s you can say that about. So it's absolutely correct to say that slavery was the reason the Confederates fought the war, even if it's not the reason Lincoln did. I think that gets you most of what people want to say when they say the war was over slavery.

[watwut]

> The reason the South seceded was primarily that they believed (mostly wrongly) that the North wanted to end slave ownership, which they viewed as both economically destructive and a violation of their rights.

The south was trying to expand slavery to territories and north.

[bscphil]

Even assuming that is true, it makes no sense as a reason to secede. Assuming the Civil War never happened, they would still have lost all political influence by seceding.

[watwut]

The whole conflict was about territories. It is not like north would care what happens to slaves in the south.

There was balance - half states slave states, half not. Territories being not slave states would disturb balance. They feared being outvoted. They feared that territories being not slave states would be addmission that slavery is wrong and put pressure on them to stop slavery.

Seceding makes you completely independent. You dont loose power, you gain it.

[0815test]

> The reason the South seceded was primarily that they believed (mostly wrongly) that the North wanted to end slave ownership, which they viewed as both economically destructive and a violation of their rights.

Well, that, and there was a popular perception that abolitionism was just the camel's nose under the tent; the shared mindset within the South was very much "okay, we may or may not like slavery but unless we put up a decent fight now, those busybody Northerners are going to screw us over completely, what with their control of the federal government. So we've been put in a position of having to defend slavery now, whether we like it or not." If you accept this point of view, you could even view the war as having been a success for the South; sure, they gave the North abolition, but it stopped there; their broader cultural specificity was nicely preserved, in a way that it might not have been otherwise!