I've got to disagree about it being money that caused the founders to avoid the slavery question. As I noted before, human motivations are never purely one thing or another.
In this case, the founders knew that freeing all slaves would be a massive disruption to at least half of the states (that's where the "economic" issues come in) which is a concern and it would result in the country not being united- the slave states would never ratify any government that freed the slaves. We'd have had the country of Virginia, of Carolina, of Pennsylvania, etc... that would either war with each other or war with Britain and eventually be reconquered. (If you will recall, even United, we barely made it through the next war with Britain.)
Of note, even the slaveholders were aware of this compromise with evil. The famous Jefferson quote, "Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever" is about slavery.
So, yes, they were hypocrites, in that they considered slavery evil, but owned slaves. They did, however, plant the seeds for the ending of slavery by drafting the Constitution as under the Articles of Confederation the country would not have been able to do so. As I mentioned, it's mixed and those who want to hate everything about our culture want only to see the evil and not the struggle. (And, of course, ignore the state of most of humanity through history.)
I perhaps should have said economics, but yep. Money/economics was a huge part. Including why the South would not have given up slaves.
Sidenote, but have listened to some interesting lectures and whatnot that slavery makes folks stupid. Not really, just not interested in developing technology. Or spending the capital to invest in equipment. That not having slaves meant the North industrialized far faster and to a greater extent. Aside from the natural human instinct to desire to oppress other folks, slavery allows you to be inefficient by just throwing bodies at a problem rather than figuring out the proper way of doing things. Akin to throwing hardware at a software bottleneck. It's a bad idea, and it's hideously inefficient.
I concur that most of the Founders saw it exactly that way. A compromise with evil against a larger evil.
I can understand your hatred of the institution but things like that are rarely well aimed and a whole lot more innocent people would be devastated and killed in the process. It is the main reason most us don't really want vigilante movements to organize for other crimes as they have historically gotten out of control and gone well beyond their purpose. Sherman's March accomplished the military purpose it aimed for. Reconstruction efforts after the war attempted to do what you wanted to see. The hatred and resentment over that (among ALL Southerners) lasted quite a while.
Also, the bolded part was a problem everywhere, not just the South. Full equality under the law was something that took a lot longer to happen. Black people continued to be second class citizens in lot of ways. Slavery was bad and needed to end, but there is plenty of blame to go around for everything else.
So have civilians in every war since WW1. We killed a lot of innocent French and Germans fighting the Kaiser. More fighting Hitler. More fighting the communists. More fighting terrorists. We killed easily well north of a hundred thousand Iraqis to overthrow Saddam. Probably five times that number. I do think there should be a cost/benefit analysis. In my personal opinion, Iraq was not worth thousands of US lives, let alone trillions of dollars and X hundred thousand Iraqis. The Kaiser, the South, Hitler, communists and terrorism generally? Absolutely worth the cost in blood.
A significant enough number of the population supported or was indifferent. They were allowing an aristocracy to take power. IMHO, even more than slavery, smashing that aristocracy was probably the more important aspect of the civil war. That they held economic power because of slavery is more damning, but they were a significant regional threat.
I'm not a blood thirsty savage, despite it being easily assumed from my earlier posts. I do believe the US government should have made reasonable offers. A hard cutoff in slavery set X years in the future. Offering to buy all slaves for fair market value outright. Offering assistance in industrializing to reduce the need for slaves. Not screwing around with tariffs to benefit wealthy northern industrialists. Just because someone deserves death doesn't mean you should go around killing them. As you say, vigilante movements such as the Klan or Antifa are their own evil and rapidly become worse than whatever alleged purpose they are supposed to serve.
Remembering back to past threads, I do not recall anyone claiming that the slavery had nothing to do with it which is what I get from the first part of your post. As I recall, that fueled much of the arguments on this site. One side was saying there were other factors in addition to slavery. The other side kept saying "but you can't take slavery out it". The first side essentially said "we aren't, we are just mentioning other factors in addition to it". ............And on it went with half the people just talking past each other and everyone wanting to put in their two cents.....
Seeing both sides, I think any reasonable person could say "The Civil War was 80% slavery, give or take. Probably higher but we're trying to be nice"
There WERE other factors. But overwhelming, it was slavery and everything else was related. The states rights argument was largely "the feds were trying to soft ban slavery". Not that I don't believe the feds do trample over states, but enforcing Constitutional protections of citizens against state level oppression is definitely a legitimate task for the feds. The tariffs were part payoff to northern industrialists, but also to punish the south for refusing to industrialize and relying instead on slavery. I'm trying to think of a single "other factor" that was entirely or even substantially unrelated to slavery.
It is a legitimate response to "there were other factors" folks (of which I very much include myself) to say it was overwhelming about slavery to the point where bringing up the other issues should only be of academic consideration. It was virtually all slavery or slavery related subject based.
