It was a very complicated argument, that got more complicated over thirty years or so. But in the end it was not about property rights as such, but over a particular sort of property right.
Simply put -
- The South was concerned about certain Constitutional property rights - constitutional as in explicitly called for in the Constitution; the second amendment was vague in comparison to the wording in Article IV
- The North refused (unconstitutionally) to honor these rights, arguing that they were intrinsically evil.
This conflict was THE cause of secession, and quite simply explains why the South fought. They fought for slaves.
The confusion arises over the reasons why the NORTH fought. The North didn’t fight to free the slaves, true. They fought, most simply put, because the South fought.
On other matters -
Unlike most other slave-owning countries, in the US slaves were broadly owned. In places like Brazil and the Caribbean slaves tended to be owned by a relatively small class of landowners. The end of slavery in the US was bound to be messier and more traumatic.
The argument proceeded during periods where the value of slaves waxed and waned. In 1860 slave values were in fact rather high and slaves were both widely owned and constituted a major portion of Southerners real property. This is a separate matter than whether slavery was an economically sound system. A threat to slavery was a broad-based bread and butter issue. Note that a general emancipation and relocation at government expense was out of the question by then (like James Monroe’s Liberia experiment) because slave values had risen so much.
Yeah, you are right. I guess it is semantics I was arguing...
But, we are in agreement on the issue of the north not acting constitutionally. The south didn’t feel that they had any other redress than to seceed, and the north didn’t recognize their ability to seceed. (That is a Lincoln thing I believe.) Then Lincoln brilliantly set the south up to fire the first shots in South Carolina, and the fight was on.
I think that if Lincoln was unable to use the anti-slavery feeling in the north at the time that he did, the war would have ended in an armistice between two separate countries, and things would have been a lot different...