Slavery was legal and not in danger of being made illegal at the time. The issue of slavery in these documents primarily dealt with the continued balance of slave versus non-slave states. Ask yourself for a second why would the south secede if they were safe from having slavery removed from their states? What was the real issue? It wasn’t to maintain slavery as an institution as that was not being threatened at the time. They were pissed about having one fourth the population of the north but still providing 90 percent of the tariff income that the country needed to run it’s government, the vast majority of which was being spent to enhance northern industrial interest. The north had a good little slave in the southern states and had no intention of allowing them to escape. The south had had enough and the north just said shut up and bend over. They, and their idea of a federal government that imposes it’s will on anything in it’s way won the war. That’s why we’re where we are today. The Russians didn’t do it. The Yankees did.
‘Ask yourself for a second why would the south secede if they were safe from having slavery removed from their states?’
they seceded mostly for two reasons; they feared that the Republicans’ supposed agenda of no new slave states in the west would give unprecedented influence to abolitionists; and they also resented the fact that the free states could expand industrialization in the West, and the slave states couldn’t, as their slaves would be freed...and apparently it was too difficult for them to figure out an economic system not dependent on slave labor...