Slavery and Revisionist Writers...

1. You address your post to Talent Scout, but I cannot find his post. On which TH article did he comment? I have enchanged posts with him before. Sometimes his posts are interesting and informative;othertimes notoriously misinformed. I would like to read it for myself. Ill check back to see if you can respond.

2. Just a couple of comments on your post itself.
You are right in noting that the war was not fought initially to free the slaves (Lincoln said so many times) and that the Emancipation Proclamation was a military and political move. But remember that the slavery--specificlally its status in the unorganized western territories brought about the secession crisis and the war. But it did BECOME a war to free slaves.
3. I am not sure what you mean by Lincoln not opposing slavery. I assume you mean abolishing it.He did not believe he had the constitutional power to do so (except as a military move.) He most certainly opposed slavery. He believed it was a moral evil. And he and the Republcan Party opposed slavery's extension into the territories so it could be, as he put it, "put on the course of ultimate extinction."
3. You create an unnecessary ambiguity over the word slave by referring to Northern factory workers as slaves. They had no such status. They owned their own persons and their wages, however low they may have been. It is interesting how southern critiques of the northern factory system anticipated Karl Marx by a few years.I doubt many factory workers would trade places with slaves.
4. Most plantation owners were certainly not English.And if they were, what is the point?