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Your comment that individual motivations to fight are "more complex" is very true and really quite an understatement. 

In the antebellum South only a fairly small percentage of whites actually owned slaves.  The actual percentage is the subject of some debate but the absolute highest expression of it that I have seen comes from a pro-reparations activist who claims that almost one-third of southern families owned slaves.  Even using that extraordinarily high figure, still more than two-thirds of southern families did NOT own slaves so it stands to reason that at least around two-thirds of Confederate Soldiers had no direct personal benefit from the institution of Slavery. 

In the North the situation was quite convoluted.  A lot of poorer whites, particularly recent immigrants were at best lukewarm to the concept of abolition due to fear of wage competition from freed slaves.  This contributed to anti-war sentiment in the north that got so bad as to require Union Troops to be rushed from their win at the Battle of Gettysburg not South in pursuit of Lee but Northeast to NYC to put down violent anti-draft riots. 

In my own ancestry (AFAIK all of my ancestors were in North America before the Civil War) I have some ancestors who appear to have been drafted and fought rather begrudgingly for the Union possibly fighting to "preserve the Union" and others who joined up of their own free will and expressly for the purpose of freeing the slaves. 

My 2-great grandfather (Mother's, Mother's, Father's Father) was born to Quaker parents and raised a Quaker.  Quakers opposed both slavery and war but my 2-great Grandfather Joshua and his brother Caleb felt that "opposing slavery" as an intellectual pursuit but sitting idly by while hundreds of thousands of your countrymen actually fought to end it was hypocritical so they joined up.  My three-great uncle Caleb was killed in a small and previously little-known Pennsylvania Village called Gettysburg on July 3, 1863.  His brother Joshua served for the entire war from nearly the beginning until the final surrender.  He was wounded twice but survived the war and went on to have a large family with my great-grandfather as one of his sons.  I have a picture of my Grandmother (born 1909) sitting on his knee in about 1919. 

My ancestors Joshua and Caleb were unusual but not altogether unique.  They joined up explicitly to end slavery.  Most Northerners fought either because they didn't have a choice or to "preserve the union".  In fact, Lincoln was not elected on a platform of "ending slavery".  His platform was to stop the spread (not allow it in new territories) and enforce the already existing prohibition on the importation of additional slaves. 

Then there is the Emancipation Proclamation:
The Holy Roman Empire was famously neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.  Similarly, the Emancipation Proclamation functionally did not free a single slave.  Lincoln worded it carefully because there were still some slaves within Union States and, in any case, the President's Constitutional authority to unilaterally free such  persons was dubious at best.  Lincoln avoided those issues by proclaiming the freedom of slaves in areas "then in rebellion".  That made it a military action under his authority as "Commander in Chief" which had a much stronger Constitutional basis than a domestic Presidential edict. 

Additionally, the Emancipation Proclamation was not issued for the purpose of freeing slaves, it was issued for the purpose of keeping France and Great Britain out of the war.  The developing industrial North was an economic competitor to European industry while the agrarian South was an economic supplier of raw materials to and purchaser of industrial goods from European Industry.  The European powers were in a bit of a pickle because their economic interests leaned strongly toward the South but Slavery was extremely unpopular in Europe so their emotional interests were with the North.  The purpose of the Emancipation Proclamation was to make the abolition of slavery an explicit war aim of the North which would effectively make it impossible for either Britain or France to join the war on the (now) explicitly pro-slavery side. 

That's a great piece of family history, thanks for sharing.  I do know that I had some ancestors who unfortunately fought for the South.  I would be very surprised if any of our family ancestors owned slaves, because you had to be somewhat wealthy to own them, and I'm pretty sure we never had any rich kinfolks.  

I doubt any enlisted man ever saw or knew about any Articles of Succession or any of the CSA knowledge.  There is no doubt that slavery suppressed the wages of the average southerner, because competing with free labor is a bitch IMO.  The problem is that nobody in the south and many in the north really accepted the slaves as any kind of equal, so there was always a question on what to do with the freed slaves?  

I often think about the people who signed up to fight to defeat slavery and it makes me very proud to be an American.  Think about it this way.  Slavery was not an American institution, it was a European one.  It was brought here by Europeans hundreds of years before there ever was a United States.  They  may not have allowed it at home, but it was ok to do "off world".  At least 100-150 years before the US existed.  We knew it was bad, it took another ~80 years to get rid of it.  And it was by far the deadliest war in our history.  So although it is a shameful thing in our history we faced it and beat it, even if some of my ancestors fought on the wrong side of the war, the country as a whole prevailed.  IMO just as important as our development as a country as the original Revolutionary War, because we still had to kick that part of Europe out.  

I think it clear the primary reason for secession was slavery and Lincoln's election.  The war itself was avoidable, at some cost, and men fought for a variety of reasons, slavery not being very prominent for most.

typical Stros fan

THIS DAY IN HISTORY: 

St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1929)
When Jack McGurn, a member of Al Capone's gang, was almost killed by members of rival George "Bugs" Moran's gang, Capone decided to retaliate by luring Bugs and some of his men to a warehouse and killing them. On the day of the massacre, Capone's men thought that the rival crime boss had entered the warehouse and opened fire. They killed seven men but not Bugs—he had grown suspicious and changed his plans.