>>The reason for the war, as I wrote above, was slavery.

To be fair, the reason for *secession* was slavery. If you look at the declarations of secession for the different states, that's what they list, but there certainly were others, primarily loss of control of the federal government, secondarily some banking issues.

The reasons secession became a war were more mixed, but primarily, in the North, that the Southern states had seceded, and there was a desire in the 'yankee' parts of the North that the country should be kept whole (IMO somewhat ironically as some New England states had threatened to secede over the war of 1812).

Abolitionists were a minority, and a large minority of those thought that enslaved peoples shouldn't just be freed, but 'returned' to Africa. (google 'Liberia')

Elsewhere in the North, there was strong sentiment in the middle part of the country to just let those states go - that sentiment turned around when Confederacy forces fired on Fort Sumpter. So you could argue that the precipitating factor was a miscalculation on one side - but I think that's pretty universal.

That said, I agree 100% about the post Civil War "Big Lie" - and the north going much too lightly on what were traitors to the nation. IMO, at a minimum, enslavers owed back pay. The South didn't have much circulating cash (see banking issues above) so pay in land.

BTW/FWIW, this lack of cash is what led to sharecropping rather than an employer/employee relationship.

Also agreed on poor treatment of Blacks in the North. Isabel Wilkerson's 'Other Suns' is an excellent history of this.