Even a cursory examination of history, including documents, communications, and records kept by the confederate states which make it very clear that the war was specifically about slavery and the assertion that whites were superior to blacks. The fact that not all northerners were abolitionists is irrelevant, and your mentioning that they were still incredibly racist still is also irrelevant.
One made an issue out of keeping slavery legal. You can complain about the slaughtering of civilians all you want–for one, welcome to every war ever, nobody is the good guy in a war, if you’re extremely lucky, you might get least worst guy. Secondly, how about we contrast that with hundreds of years of slavery, and the staggering amount of torture, rape, and murder that occurred at the hands of slave owners. Literally hundreds of years of that. It doesn’t make it right, but I feel like you’re throwing it out there as though it’s some kind of counter to the North, something to cast them in a bad light. That’s fine, but you just also have to recognize that the south treated black people like livestock for hundreds of years. You can’t throw that stone without accepting the fact that the confederacy literally existed to secure the “right” of some people to treat other people like property.
That is what the war was about, that is what the confederacy was about, and we have only just barely begun to do something to help mend the enormous deficit of opportunities for black people that white people themselves created by systematically oppressing black people. You make a problem, you fix it. You don’t just get to say, “oh, we’re sorry!” and then walk away, a lot of people got what they got because they stole it from others, and it doesn’t matter if you now had nothing to do with it, it is everyone’s responsibility to ensure equality.
Not that I feel like you much care about that.
