[0815test]

> The reason the South seceded was primarily that they believed (mostly wrongly) that the North wanted to end slave ownership, which they viewed as both economically destructive and a violation of their rights.

Well, that, and there was a popular perception that abolitionism was just the camel's nose under the tent; the shared mindset within the South was very much "okay, we may or may not like slavery but unless we put up a decent fight now, those busybody Northerners are going to screw us over completely, what with their control of the federal government. So we've been put in a position of having to defend slavery now, whether we like it or not." If you accept this point of view, you could even view the war as having been a success for the South; sure, they gave the North abolition, but it stopped there; their broader cultural specificity was nicely preserved, in a way that it might not have been otherwise!