Someone please show me the official documents or discussions concerning doing away with slavery that caused the south to succeed. The south did not just leave the union because of slavery.
Sorry, I missed your post on first review.
You ask an excellent question.
Secessionists themselves wrote some documents explaining why they declared independence from the United States.
This site shows all four of them, though not in proper sequence.
The correct sequence is South Carolina (#1), Mississippi (#2), Georgia (#5), then Texas (#7).
The first two (South Carolina and Mississippi) are especially important to understand, because they were the first ones ever written -- in late December 1860 and early January 1861 -- in the heat and flush of excitement of the moment, and before there was a lot of feed-back or second thoughts coming in from other Southerners or sympathetic northerners.
In those two documents we see the primary motivating force behind secession, and there is simply no doubt: it was their concerns to protect the institution of slavery, and nothing else.
Later, the argument gets gussied up with some other minor issues.
But I thought of an analogy to explain it all:
OK, now let's suppose that, for sake of discussion, the wife suddenly discovers her husband has been leading a double life all these years.
He has, oh, say, a second family, just something totally unacceptable to her, and so she decides to end the marriage.
On her way out the door, she tells him why, the real reason: he has a second family.
But then she also throws in all the other little stuff which bothered her all those years, but were not by themselves cause for divorce.
In the case of secession beginning in 1860, protecting slavery was their real reason, everything else was minor stuff, thrown in as they walked out the door.
You can see this clearly, by reading South Carolina and Mississippi first -- there's no mention of anything except slavery.
Later, as it's going out the door, so to speak, Texas throws in some other minor items, none of which individually, or all together, would have driven Southerners to secession.
If you ask, "how real was the actual threat to slavery," well, that is a complicated question.
Yes, Southern secessionist "Fire Eaters" exaggerated the immediate threat to slavery represented by the election of "Black Republican" Lincoln, in November 1860.
But long term there's no doubt that slavery was in for a rough-go, no matter which course of action the Southern slave-holders chose.