I’ll cede that, I was massively oversimplifying in the name of time. I did know that the federal government at the time was very willing to compromise to keep the southern states in the union, and that the whole reason the South went ahead with the Civil War was because they saw that their economic engine would be dismantled over time even if they agreed to the compromises.

But it all just goes to show how it’s semantics to say it was state’s rights instead of slavery that caused the war, in the same way it’s semantics to say my mother died of liver failure instead of cancer, or that a person jumping off a cliff was killed by the massive internal trauma from the sudden stop, instead of the fall.