| > I get the feeling we’ve read different history books. I get the feeling we've read different history. Forget books or opinions provided by other people many years after the fact, forget my opinion, just look at what the seceding states themselves said to justify their secession. For example, here's South Carolina:
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp The VERY FIRST sentence identifies the reason to secede being that the northern states are refusing to send back their fugitive slaves! And if it's not clear enough for you, they repeat it in more detail just a little further down in the document: --- "In the present case, that fact is established with certainty. We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof. The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: "No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due." This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made. The greater number of the contracting parties held slaves, and they had previously evinced their estimate of the value of such a stipulation by making it a condition in the Ordinance for the government of the territory ceded by Virginia, which now composes the States north of the Ohio River." |