Mrebo said:
Question: did putting an end to slavery spur technological advancement in the South? Particularly in agriculture?
Question: was the issue of slavery, though important to the genesis of the Civil War and detestable to some segment of the population, resolved mostly because it was convenient to do so?
Disclaimer: While I am no Civil War scholar, I do know quite a bit and I'll answer these to the best of my knowledge.
I: Unfortunately it did not. The south's economy was utterly, entirely destroyed by the war (I can't stress that enough, it was just gone); due in part to being rendered bankrupt by attempting to support the southern military machine, Grant and Sherman's total war Scorched Earth strategies (which included loss of livestock, housing, cities, infrastructure, equipment, et cetera), the death of about a third of the south's white male population, the price of cotton taking a dive, massive debts with nothing to pay them with, and especially the freeing of the slaves and thus the loss of most of the entire workforce and the backbone of the southern economy. Basically all the south had left was the land.
What happened during the largely-failed Reconstruction Era was that the owners of the big plantations (who were now just as dirt poor as everybody else [to the point that they couldn't even pay the wages of the freed blacks]) had to divide them up and rent the land out to other, unlanded whites or freed slaves. Rebuilding the railroads with updated equipment was probably the biggest boost to the rebuilding of the south, and industrialization did start to slowly pick up, but basically the south was set way back by the war and was still mostly agricultural and focused on cotton (which was still mostly harvested by hand until the some time in the 1950's because it is easily damaged) until the 1940's.
II: Slavery was already gone or on its way out in most of America by the 1860's (just about every state north of the Mason-Dixon had either abolished it or was in the process of phasing it out between the late 1700's and early 1800's) largely due to the fact that it was already illegal in most other "civilized" western countries, and the United States, which was founded on the Enlightenment principles and the Bill of Rights realized it was an unjust and therefore an institution that was unsupportable in good conscience; slavery in most northern states was gone by the time of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 (the slow phasing out in some northern states meant that slavery didn't end until 1865 with the Thirteenth Amendment). This was obviously helped along by the Industrial Revolution which, in many cases, made slave labour obsolete, therefore it was no longer a "justifiable" and thus an uncomfortably-ignored "necessary evil".
However, because the south's fortune was based on cotton which was really only harvestable by hand due to its fragility, and because cotton was such a huge commodity in massive worldwide demand that made a lot of northerners rich in the 1800's, meant that slavery was still being ignored to a degree, though there was a huge amount of tension building over it, which eventually led to war.
So, to answer your question, slavery is just wrong and everyone knew it; it just made people money so they ignored that fact until it all boiled over.