The context is important: southern states were fighting specifically for the right to continue to enslave people. Any argument that doesn't focus on slavery in the context of the civil war we had isn't valid, or at least is incomplete, because it elides the reason for the war in the first place.

You're conflating a number of completely unrelated items, at least: individual motivations, catalysts, and the broad-strokes reasons a group fights in a war.

The civil war was fought because the southern states wanted to maintain their slave economy. It is as clear, cut and dried as that. Individual southerners may have fought for glory, for Suzy to love them, for money, or for any other reason, but the prosecutors of the war effort for the south did it because their economy was dependent on slaves and they wanted that to continue. It's not disingenuous to state that.

Your wrong. The Civil war was fought because the confederate states of America fired on Fort Sumter, the establishment of the confederacy the freeing of the slaves all of those happened as a consequence or prior to the actual war.

If you want to get that reductive than I am right. The Civil war happened because the Confederate States of America fired on Fort Sumter and everything else was ancillary. Just like WW1 happened because the Archduke Franz Ferdinand got assassinated.

Youre argument is overly reductive and your ignorant of history

It’s mutually exclusive because it wasn’t the internal rights of individual states that set off the civil war, but the question of which way western states would be. In other words southern states wanted to impose rules on the union outside their borders.

Florida trying to tell California what to do is by definition not a states rights issue.

> Seems to me these aren't mutually exclusive

In the abstract, they are not.

Its just that the slavery explanation is factually true and the other is false, though it represents part of one sides propaganda (and more strongly that of the retrospective sympathizers of that side than the actual side, which was quite explicit about slavery specifically as the motivation.)

> And the southern states absolutely did not want to adhere to the laws set by the northern states.

To add to the sibling comments, the southern states hated states' rights when northern states were liberating escaped slaves within their jurisdiction. The Fugitive Slave Act immediately destroys any argument that the Civil War was about states' rights.