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Kstatida
I'm sure Northern propaganda played on "oh those pitiful black people, them slavers sell mothers from children"
Which is what was happening. And I think we can agree it was fucked up.
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Kstatida
The roots of war are always economic.
You may not be wrong, but you're oversimplifying it. It's a pretty weak argument in my opinion to state something so general and use the premise to exclude all other factors. That said, it's not an invalid argument you're making, it just doesn't fully address all the issue. I know you are protecting yourself by saying "roots of war" and not the entire war itself, but I think you're doing this carefully and on purpose to avoid the main argument. :)
i.e. "Root is economic, but other factors include x y z. I don't care about x y z because the root is economic".
It sort of sounds like you're arguing that the Civil War would have happened with or without slavery, which surely is not the case. Slavery was a major fucking contributing factor to the economic situation which led to the Civil War. Was it simply a moral crusade against slavery? Of course not. But some people felt strongly enough about the slavery issue to throw their proverbial hat into the ring and risk their life to fight. And, some people just wanted to make a profit from it, or avoid losing profit, sure.
The point where I agree with you is that people do tend to brigade and say, Civil war was completely about freeing the slaves, which is not entirely true either.