[Tired of Taxes]

Guitar Josh wrote: "Slavery was the #1 reason for the South secession . . ."

Phlyer wrote: "What is your evidence for this? I have never seen this in contemporary Southern writings."

Interjecting here. Southern states put their reason for secession in writing in official declarations and resolutions. Those official documents gave slavery as the reason for secession.

[Phlyer]

Those official documents gave slavery as the reason for secession.

I did look that up, and while I'll quibble to the extent that in at least some of them, slavery is only one of the reasons given, it nonetheless figures prominently in the ones I found.

Of course, those writing the articles of succession were a tiny fraction of the population of the Southern states, and in most cases had a vested interest in keeping slaves that was not shared by the main population. But that's what they wrote.

That leads to the question of why would all of those non-slave-owning citizens march off to die for something they didn't have anyway? I think it's still true that for most of the Southern population, high tariffs on imported goods, even restrictions to prevent the importation at all of the tools of industrialization (which would show up as prices for items that had to be obtained from the North, and therefore impact all of the citizens) would be a more compelling reason to separate. But you definitely provided evidence that at least some of the 'contemporary Southern writings - which is what I asked for - did focus on slavery. Thanks for the insight.

I think there is a strong feeling among many that the State's Rights issue has been underplayed, for all that slavery (per your evidence) was an important issue. It's exemplified in the "Gettysburg" movie where Longstreet says (at least in the movie, "We should have freed the slaves and *then* fired on Fort Sumter."

By the way, I disagree with that as well. As I said, I'm a Constituionalist and that would not have been the Constitutionally-sound approach either. But the South was getting screwed, and on a lot more issues than slavery. They needed to do something.