Whatever Nikki Haley wants to claim, southern states did indeed secede over slavery. It would seem to follow from this that northern states fought to end slavery, but this is absolutely not true. At the time there were some northern abolitionist politicians, but nationwide abolition wasn't on the mainstream agenda in the 1850s. Lincoln's 1860 election precipitated secession, but he was no abolitionist.
The immediate issue was the expansion of slavery into newly admitted territories, which Lincoln opposed for economic reasons. Like all capitalists, slaveowners needed to expand their reach in order to survive and thrive, and at least since the 1820s they'd struggled to bring new slave states into the union and Lincoln's election threatened their ability to do this.* This is why one of the confederacy's major policy goals immediately after secession was the imperial conquest of parts of the Caribbean and Latin America in order to increase their slave territory.
Northern states didn't start out fighing to end slavery. Northern finance and industry made huge profits from slavery. They eventually realized that they had to end it, but only because their hands were forced by circumstances and strategic considerations, not least of which was the immediate widespread ongoing slave revolt the war inspired.
So while it's essential to remember that the confederacy seceded over slavery, the North didn't oppose secession to free slaves. Like most modern wars the American Civil War is most fruitfully seen as a dispute between factions of the ruling class over the most sustainable ways to exploit labor. It resulted in abolition mostly due to the determination of the slaves themselves, who forced that goal on the federal government.
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* Slaveowners had many reasons to push for the expansion of slavery in addition to capital's ongoing need for growth. Another major one was that the North's faster population growth threatened to undermine the disproportionate political power the South enjoyed due to the fact that each slave counted as 3/5 of a free man for the purpose of determining representation.
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