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Bravo PaulZe! Your first sentence says everything - all else from our FRiend here becomes bluff and bluster....and bullspit.

jeffersondem has a nasty habit of conjoining two disparate thoughts and then imputing them to his opponents as though they were ours. I suspect that nothing short of a baseball bat will deter him from his poor habit - and of course there’s no profit in going down that road.

You write that, “Both sides hated the radical abolitionists”. I might quibble just a bit there, preferring to say that neither north or south had any time or interest for them. Slavery, as an institution, was slowly winding its way toward its final solution and ultimate demise. It was the 500 pound gorilla in the room that no one could ignore and wasn’t going to just go away.

The Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850 demonstrates the primacy and urgency of the issue, and the dissension and disaffection felt by northern and southern neighbors. The two pieces of legislation were messy, were awkward, were severely flawed, and weren’t much favored by anyone - except for the alternative. This was government doing what governments ought to do - negotiate and compromise. It was only those radical abolitionists who spoke of universal abolition, including constitutional remedies, and no one was having it.

One of the favored sayings of the neo-confederates is that the south “just wanted to be left alone”. In truth, the south wanted what it wanted and effectively negotiated in their own interests for decades. The south dominated federal politics for most of our nations early history. And for the leadership of the south, the slavers, life couldn’t be better. They were prosperous far beyond their own expectations, fabulously wealthy, and immensely powerful. They wanted to keep things just as they were - as long as they were dominant.

Among the peculiarities of slavery is the fact that slaves didn’t want to be slaves. As a consequence they had a habit of running away. Naturally, being an expensive proposition in the first lace, slave owners didn’t care for this propensity and sought the errant slaves’ return. Testy exchanges were common when southerners came into the free states and started turning things upside down looking for their chattel property. Slave owners were indignant that yankees objected to their presence and negotiated laws strengthening their rights in the reacquisition of their chattel property.

I’m sure you can imagine the sense of repugnance that some northerners felt to be so obliged - sort of like forcing the proverbial baker to bake a cake for faggots I imagine. These actions served to increase tensions between northerners and their southern cousins.

None of this occurred in a vacuum. Most of the industrialized nations had already done away with slavery. The united States was fast becoming an outlier. And then came Scott v. Sanford and completely overturned the cart. Two dramatic changes came with that horrid decision: the first (and far away the foremost) was Taney’s unilateral judgement that the negroe race was significantly less than human and unsuitable for citizenship. The second was that the Peculiar Institution had no boundaries - that slave owners were “free” to take their chattel property anywhere they pleased and with complete impunity, and that northerners who wished their communities not to be slave states were kindly invited to sit down and shut up.

I apologize for my verbosity - I’m almost done!

Neo-confederates or confederate apologists wring the trees looking for possible alternative excuses or rationalizations for the Civil War but you hit the nail on the head - the Peculiar Institution of slavery saturated every aspect of the south - its economic interests, its culture, and ultimately like the proverbial tiger caught by the tail, its mortality.

They couldn’t let it go, they couldn’t imagine life without it, and they sure as heck weren’t going to let anyone decide otherwise for them! The election of Abraham Lincoln was perceived as a death knell for the slavocracy. Despite Ol Abe’s exhortations that he would leave it alone, southerners felt otherwise. This time around the southern leadership decided not to negotiate. And they had zero desire to compromise. So they took a belligerent tone and said FU to their northern cousins, along with anything that wasn’t nailed down. Not because of anything that Lincoln did - he hadn’t even taken office yet. Not because of anything Lincoln said - his record was consistent and conciliatory. Not because of Lincoln - he was merely the pretext - the excuse for their misbehavior.

Because they wanted what they wanted, and would do anything to get it. Forget the honor, forget the oaths, forget the consequences, and forget the price. Southern leadership had a temper tantrum at losing an election and took it out on whoever they could by blowing everything up.