[BroJoeK]

PeaRidge: "none of the "Ordinances of Secession", found here mention the issue. As you can plainly see, they do not."

OK, let's look at them one-by-one:

1. South Carolina:
   • Ordnance of Secession: provided no reasons, zero, nada.

   • Official Reasons for Secession:
     "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery".

2. Mississippi:
   • Ordnance of Secession: provided no reasons, zero, nada.

   • Official Reasons for Secession:
     "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world."

3. Florida:
   • Ordnance of Secession: provided no reasons, zero, nada

   • Official Reasons for Secession: none.

4. Alabama:
   • Ordnance of Secession:
     "...election of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin to the offices of president and vice-president of the United States of America, by a sectional party, avowedly hostile to the domestic institutions and to the peace and security of the people of the State of Alabama..."

   • Official Reasons for Secession: none.

5. Georgia:
   • Ordnance of Secession: provided no reasons, zero, nada.

   • Official Reasons for Secession:
     "...we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery."

6. Louisiana:
   • Ordnance of Secession: provided no reasons, zero, nada.

   • Official Reasons for Secession: none

7. Texas:
   • Ordnance of Secession:
     "...the power of the Federal Government is sought to be made a weapon with which to strike down the interests and property of the people of Texas, and her sister slave-holding States..."

   • Official Reasons for Secession:
     "The controlling majority of the Federal Government, under various pretences and disguises, has so administered the same as to exclude the citizens of the Southern States, unless under odious and unconstitutional restrictions, from all the immense territory owned in common by all the States on the Pacific Ocean, for the avowed purpose of acquiring sufficient power in the common government to use it as a means of destroying the institutions of Texas and her sister slaveholding States."

The first seven Deep South secessions were all about slavery, and nothing else of any importance.

At that same time the Upper South (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas) refused to secede just to protect slavery, but later felt compelled to secede -- after Fort Sumter -- when the issue became which side would they chose in war: slave or free?

[PeaRidge]

You used the term ‘official reasons for secession.’

Who was the official?