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Robert J. Borer's avatar

Take a look at South Carolina's secession document. It is explicit about the reason for their secession.

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Krystine Kercher's avatar

The problem wasn't that there weren't plenty of excuses other than slavery for the rift between Northern and Southern states.

The problem was that if the U.S. added any more free states to the Union, the slave states would lose the voting majority that had allowed them up to that point to keep their slaves. They knew that public opinion was against them and that it was growing ever more firmly abolitionist.

This was true even in the South. Most people didn't own slaves. Even in South Carolina, where plantations were the backbone of the economy, the number of American citizens owning slaves rose to barely half the total of those eligible to vote, and in most slave states, the percentage of American citizens who owned slaves was quite a lot less.

When Abraham Lincoln won the race for president, it became clear that the next few states to be admitted to the Union would be free states. This is why he didn't have to come out and openly support slavery: it was already being done in by sheer force of public opinion.

So--yes--the Civil War was about State's Rights and it was also about slavery--because it had everything to do with whether the slave states would be permitted to keep their slaves.

The plantation economic model was unworkable without slave labor.

In the North, the abolitionists had instead built factories powered by coal and steam, and by water and other mechanical ingenuities of the time. While factory conditions were far from ideal, there was a big push to find ways to make the jobs safer and to provide a living wage as well as mental stimulation for their workers by employing people to read aloud to them while they completed their repetitive tasks.

Meanwhile, Southern plantation farmers had no way at that time of replacing manual labor in the cotton fields with mechanical marvels, so they either had to go to war or quit farming cotton and tobacco. And they weren't about to quit farming these crops--at least not then. They were too lucrative.

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