They're not completely wrong there. One of the major dialectics of the civil war beyond just slavery were those of self-employment vs centralized employment. One one hand you had Charles Fitzhugh, a leading intellectual of the South and proponent of slavery, claimed that it was an insult to whites to insist that whites weren't fit for slavery, and many wealthy plantation families similarly putting the best spin on their existence possible. Simultaneously there was a burgeoning left-wing movement among the criminal urban centers, primarily impoverished Irish immigrants, who opposed the abolition of slavery, because 1) they didn't want to be drafted into a war that they had nothing to do with, 2) they didn't want freed blacks competing for their labor, and 3) they saw the "wage-slavery" of the factories as an equivalent subjugation as that of plantation slavery, and saw collective bargaining as a more effective solution to their squalor.
Then in comes Lincoln, anointed in the font of Jeffersonian yeomannery, breaking the false dichotomy in his first inaugural address by arguing that man does not need to work for another to work at all, and that man is capable of harvesting the fruits of his labor. Following Southern secession, the Homestead Acts then pass, enabling millions of poor and unlanded families to create their own farms, build multi-generational wealth, and ultimately enjoy a class-mobility program that accomplished more than the New Deal and Great Society combined. Southern elites seethe after decades of lobbying to force the West to allow slavery ultimately failed, as do those many second-degree beneficiaries of slavery such as wealthy (often Jewish) bankers and speculators, such as the Lehman brothers. But not all was lost for those losers, for a new hero of corporate centralization, FDR, came into being and used all his might to crush the self-employed Western farmers at the behest of wealthy agriculture lobbyists and their financiers, and thus concluded the move of the Lehmans from Southern slavery-profiteers to New York debt-profiteers.
