No conspiracy, but fighting to enslave a nation to keep it from enslaving others is the worst cause in history.
From the Northern side easily the most oft-stated reason for war, including from the President, was to preserve the Union. Your average Northerner was not willing to die for what most of 'em would have called a bunch of Africans to put it mildly.
Among the Southern leadership the implication was that the South was about to be collectively outvoted and thus effectively disenfranchised by the North. The most pressing concern, besides the appalling prospect of an enormous former slave population running amok, was the threat to the cotton industry upon which the whole existence of the South as they knew it then depended.
It was this Southern economic elite that wrote those odious provisions enshrining slavery in the Confederate Constitution and who enumerated those slavery-based statements of Causes of Secession.
For the rank and file Southerner, a main motive seems to have been a natural loyalty to the place of one's birth and/or residence (Robert E. Lee for example fit this profile), as well as a resentment and contempt of the Yankee. An almost universal confidence of an easy victory at the start played into it too.
But even for the common Southerner, the prospect of a forced Emancipation of te hordes of slaves in their midst would have been catastrophic.
As to the economic ruin of the South in the decades after the war, I dunno how much of that can be ascribed to a fall in the price of cotton on the world market.
Going into it, the Confederacy had been planning to use their near-monopoly as a cotton producer to coerce world opinion and win recognition of the Confederate States, especially from England, their primary trade partner.
In anticipation of a conflict however, England had stockpiled millions of bales of Southern cotton in advance, such that IIRC as major supply shortage on the world market was not felt until 1863. Ironically, far from motivating the UK to recognise the South, the shortage and resulting rise in prices brought about huge increases in cotton production in India and IIRC Brazil, such that a post-war South, win or lose, would no longer enjoy their prior monopoly on production.
Also, if the War of Secession over here was only indirectly about slavery, in England it most certainly WAS about slavery. Americans commonly overlook the innate morality of the British nation at that time.
Ninety years later, Lancashire textile workers would give a warm reception to Mahatma Gandhi when he visited Britain, even though Ghandi's own proposed boycott of sales of Indian cotton to the UK threatened their own livelihood.
Likewise, by 1861, slavery in the Empire had already been abolished a quarter century earlier through the efforts of the widely celebrated Christian hero William Wilberforce.
More importantly, Queen Victoria herself was an ardent abolitionist, and even if she had few actual powers as monarchat that time her influence on British policies was enormous. Because of slavery, the South's hopes for recognition from England was a long shot from the start, and Lincoln's well-timed Emancipation Proclamation hammered the nails in that particular coffin.
Given the worldwide fall in cotton prices in response to increased worldwide production anyway, it is interesting to ponder what the South's post-war fortunes would have been even if they had won.
Birdwatcher
