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What you are forgetting is that for a large percentage of the North, eliminating slavery was never the point of the Civil War. The large business conglomerates of the north hated slavery for the same reason they hated communism a century later: because it was a rival economic system and a threat to the northern capitalist order. Secession and dissolution of the Union would wreck the Northern economic system by removing cheap raw materials inputs. The alternate solution, allowing the South to stay in the Union with slavery intact would allow the Slave Power to eventually spread and supplant the capitalist order.
Morals had nothing to do with it. This was the motivation of many working class people in the North too. Slavery was a threat to the economic system they lived in, and they feared subordination into the yeoman peonage system that the vast majority southern whites lived in.
There was a lot of genuine moral and religious disgust in the North against slavery. But the “Puritan Jihadists” like John Brown, Henry David Thoreau and Fredrick Douglas were never the dominant partners in the Northern coalition. More and more Puritan jihadist rhetoric was introduced as things got tough in 1863 and 1864, to ensure that the war effort held together.
That is why you never saw an attempt to pull out the slave system and racial inequality root and branch. The goal was to apply enough pressure to neutralize the competing economic system. Once that was accomplished, the Northern business interests that ran the Republican Party quickly lost interest. They had what they wanted. And they weren’t going to risk a years long paramilitary insurgency to try and elevate Southern African Americans or yeomen Southern whites.
Now the real pickle is that the Northern business interests covertly used the anti-slavery movement as an anvil to break the Republic on, and they quickly began consolidating the newly reformed country into more and more intense forms of authoritarian capitalism. Not that the South was any better, they were veering into an authoritarian feudal system, and that process would have intensified even more if they had won.
I don't fully agree with this take (and am happy to stan national unity), but it's not really wrong. I am a bit surprised that the far right hasn't tried to appropriate (both ironically and seriously?) leftist talking points by calling it "the War of Northern Imperialism" and shouting about Lincoln's colonialism. I do wonder how much longer slavery would have persisted in an independent South (my guess is a decade or two, which is admittedly still too long).
That said, the last time I saw a Sons of Confederate Veterans group out and about (within the last month or two, protesting a proposed monument removal) they were absolutely waving 50-star flags, along with Confederate, Army of Virginia, Gadsden, and, oddly, Israeli. Shit's weird, man.
Also there is some amusing irony that since air conditioning has become ubiquitous, there has been a lot more economic growth in the South, and some degree of stagnation in the Rust Belt.
Maarek of the Good Ol' Boyz podcast (mentioned in Vanity Fair's "Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets" as 'autodidact Southern gamers') has, as his pinned Tweet, this joking comment from Nov. 2019:
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Cuba was the last western-ish country to abolish slavery, in the 1880’s, but legal slavery persisted into the mid-20th century in the Middle East. The economic rationale for slavery would’ve disappeared in the 30’s. So a worst case scenario is slavery goes away in 1950 or so, a best case is an 1880’s abolition.
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Also, eliminating disparate outcomes for Southern Blacks was never actually an official goal of Reconstruction.
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