Most of my readers will be aware that this view is completely false. Lincoln didn't care much about freeing the slaves, so long as the South remained in the Union. He was an extreme nationalist.

Even if you know this, you have a lot to learn from the great Murray Rothbard. In his article "Just War," he analyzed Lincoln with his characteristic depth and knowledge of historical detail. As he saw it, the Republican Party at its inception favored three key ideas: a Protestant postmillennialist pietism that wanted to establish a Kingdom of God on earth and was anti-Catholic; a nationalist economic policy that stressed high tariffs, and an abolitionist movement that wanted to revamp Southern institutions. Rothbard called this program an "integrated despotic outlook"

What was Lincoln's place in this scheme of things? Rothbard tells us that "in the Republican Party, the 'party of great moral ideas,' different men and different factions emphasized different aspects of this integrated despotic world-outlook. In the fateful Republican convention of 1860, the major candidates for president were two veteran abolitionists: William Seward, of New York, and Salmon P. Chase of Ohio. Seward, however, was distrusted by the anti-Catholic hotheads because he somehow did not care about the alleged Catholic menace; on the other hand, while Chase was happy to play along with the former Know-Nothings, who stressed the anti-Catholic pant of the coalition, he was distrusted by Sewardites and others who were indifferent to the Catholic question. Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was a dark horse who was able to successfully finesse the Catholic question. His major emphasis was on Whig economic statism: high tariffs, huge subsidies to railroads, public works. As one of the nation's leading lawyers for Illinois Central and other big railroads, indeed, Lincoln was virtually the candidate from Illinois Central and the other large railroads."

Lincoln won the nomination through a corrupt bargain:  "One reason for Lincoln's victory at the convention was that Iowa railroad entrepreneur Grenville M. Dodge helped swing the Iowa delegation to Lincoln. In return, early in the Civil War, Lincoln appointed Dodge to army general. Dodge's task was to clear the Indians from the designated path of the country's first heavily subsidized federally chartered trans-continental railroad, the Union Pacific. In this way, conscripted Union troops and hapless taxpayers were coerced into socializing the costs on constructing and operating the Union Pacific. This sort of action is now called euphemistically 'the cooperation of government and industry.'"

Lincoln was an extreme advocate of protective tariffs in order to promote American industry. (Sound familiar?) "But Lincoln's major focus was on raising taxes, in particular raising and enforcing the tariff. His convention victory was particularly made possible by support from the Pennsylvania delegation. Pennsylvania had long been the home and the political focus of the nation's iron and steel industry which, ever since its inception during the War of 1812, had been chronically inefficient, and had therefore constantly been bawling for high tariffs and, later, import quotas. Virtually the first act of the Lincoln administration was to pass the Morrill protective tariff act, doubling existing tariff rates, and creating the highest tariff rates in American history."

Tariffs were much more important to Lincoln than ending slavery. "In his First Inaugural, Lincoln was conciliatory about maintaining slavery; what he was hard-line about toward the South was insistence on collecting all the customs tariffs in that region. As Lincoln put it, the federal government would 'collect the duties and imposts, but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against . . . people anywhere.' The significance of the federal forts is that they provided the soldiers to enforce the customs tariffs; thus, Fort Sumter was at the entrance to Charleston Harbor, the major port, apart from New Orleans, in the entire South. The federal troops at Sumter were needed to enforce the tariffs that were supposed to be levied at Charleston Harbor."