[brightball]

There's a lot of interesting reading on the subject. Each state had it's own reasons for secession. Slavery was a part of each but the significance varied dramatically by state. Here's a really interesting read I found on it while all of this was going on. In South Carolina at least, it does look like the states rights side of things was a much bigger factor.

http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/secession/

Robert E. Lee even called slavery a moral and political evil in a letter to his wife and speculated about how long it would take to be eliminated. Here's the 1856 letter.

http://www.civilwarhome.com/leepierce.html

With all this going on right now, researching what's out there from the various perspectives has been interesting.

[secstate]

Well shit, why are you downvoted? For linking to documents that dare to "revise" history and look for original source material to determine why the United States went to war?

Most curious in your first link is the fact that of the four states whose declarations of causes were evaluated, South Carolina used more of the document to argue for states' rights than slavery (37%, 20%).

Obviously slavery had a huge part to do with the conflict, but for a state that still had the Confederate States of America's flag over their capital, it seems their primary reason for war was to preserve their rights as a state in the union.