The civil war may have been about keeping slavery for the South, but the North (or Lincoln) didn't go to war on the sole issue of dismantling slavery. It takes 2 sides to go to war and they had different motivations for going there. For the North, the motivation was more about preserving the union, at least in the beginning. When we talk about why a country went to war with itself, we look at the initial motivations. Not the ending speeches
Perhaps you can find where Lincoln said before the war started that he was going to make sure slavery was abolished?
Because it looks to me like many states in the South (like South Carolina) wanted (or did) secede and for them the reason to secede was about ensuring they could keep their slaves. Obviously Lincoln was probably worried many in the South would follow suit, thus his motivation was preserving the union
Sneaky, but not sneaky enough! This is what you said.
Despite the liberal propaganda of today, the civil war was not about continuing or ending slavery
You didn't say "The North" or Lincoln" there, you made a blanket statement that the Civil War wasn't about "continuing or ending slavery".
So nice try to shift the goalposts. Almost clever too. But the declarations of war were the initial motivations, they are the literal beginning of the war. The Confederacy made no attempt at all to hide their reasons, and the reasons were slavery. Every single state said so. Every one.
I think you are so used to arguing semantics and being pedantic you completely fail to realize when maybe, you shouldn't. Maybe if you explored the subject a little deeper you might have a better appreciation for the politics of the time. Hint... Lincoln wasn't the only politician in the Unites States and the federal government banning slavery was only a matter of time.
Try reading about what others were saying. Plenty of people in the North were willing to fight over it before the start.
"If the Union must be dissolved, slavery is precisely the question upon which it ought to break." - John Quincy Adams, U.S. Secretary of State, 1820, privately commenting on Missouri Compromise of 1819
"The two systems [slave and free-labor] are...incompatible. They have never permanently existed together in one country, and they never can." - Republican Senator William H. Seward, 1858
"We are not one people. We are two peoples. We are a people for Freedom and a people for Slavery. Between the two, conflict is inevitable." - New York Tribune publisher Horace Greeley, 1854
And from the South just to make it clear,
"If it is right to preclude or abolish slavery in a Territory, why should it be allowed to remain in the States?... In spite of all disclaimers and professions there can be but one end to the submission by the South to the rule of a sectional Antislavery Government at Washington; and that end, directly or indirectly, must be the emancipation of the slaves of the South....the people of the non-slaveholding North are not and cannot be safe associates of the slaveholding South under a common Government." - South Carolina's secession convention, 1860