What role did race play during the war between the North and South?

I tend to
believe that race relations played a relatively minor role during the American Civil War.
Although one of the primary reasons the Southern states seceded was because they were losing
power in Congress (due to more newer states being declared "free states"), the
Confederacy went to war primarily to defend their independent status--not to protect their right
to own slaves. As mentioned in a previous post, Lincoln did not believe in the equality of black
and white men; his Emancipation Proclamation was intended to give the slaves in the South a
reason to remain hopeful for their own freedom and to undermine the Confederacy's status as one
of the few remaining slave-owning nations in the world. Many Southern slaves remained faithful
to their owners throughout the war, and some slaves even fought alongside their masters in the
Confederate armies. Perhaps the most important way that Negroes affected the war was in the
large numbers of black troops that were mustered into the Union...