You are absolutely right! Usually when you hear about Charles Dickens it's only for his books. When I explain to my kids what I feel the civil war was about I told them that it was mostly city vs agrarian economies and the city economies felt they knew it all and tried to force the agrarian economies to follow their model (forced compliance) or else. Slavery wasn't just human abuse. It became an economic model so when you asked someone if they wanted to leave that model behind you were almost asking them "would you and your family like to lose all of your wealth all at once?" Add into that state's rights, and the North trying to drive the South into absolute Federalism where northern cities would absolutely become the center of power and it was truly a power / money struggle more than it was a moral epiphany. It's not like the North was embracing former slaves. Many were sympathetic but seeing someone of a different color as equal wasn't guaranteed up north. The north was busy with its own hypocrisy with the Scots-Irish and the Irish (usually Catholics) as indentured servants. The North wasn't especially tolerant at all. Then Lincoln delivered the Emancipation Proclamation. But it must be viewed in full historical context. It serves multiple purposes - to paint the South as racists (which to be fair, they had slaves so that was accurate), to contrast the North from the South as a great savior (which is propaganda that still endures), and to deprive the enemy of resources by getting them to leave the South and flee to the North. Lincoln wasn't all THAT down with proclaiming freedom for slaves, but to hear the bullshit in History textbooks he was some amazing 7 foot tall angel from on high rather than a super awkward and gangly dude from Illinois.

“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,” he wrote in an editorial published in the Daily National Intelligencer in August 1862. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/emancipation-proclamation

Textbooks aren't going to get it right for as long as publishing houses are run by foaming at the mouth liberals they will tell the story their way, which is to say by lying. I actually saw a textbook only dedicate one page to Reagan, but 14 pages to Cesar Chavez. Nevermind that Reagan stopped the Cold War and defeated the evil empire, he only gets one, single page for that. Fourteen pages for Chavez.