[Alberta's Child]

Like it or not, slavery was firmly established in the U.S. at the time the Constitution was ratified by every one of the original thirteen states. A provision for counting slaves is even written into the Constitution — because (now get this hypocrisy) — the “free” states in the north didn’t consider slaves counted in the census at all.

If states like Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia could have known in the 1780s what would happen to them 80+ years later, they never would have ratified the Constitution in the first place. That right there is enough to convince me that they had every right to secede from the U.S.

[jmacusa]

Slavery had been abolished in the North by 1804. Slavery was vital to the Souths economy and it choose a path of violent secession and lost.