[rockrr]

The specific functions--which did not include one faction imposing its will on internal affairs on another--became virtually impossible with the decline in mutual respect, and a common identity.

If you mean the slave holding states imposing their will upon the rest of the states, I agree wholeheartedly. The degree to which the slavers imposed the Peculiar Institution either directly, in the case of border states and new states or indirectly, as in the case of the Fugitive Slave Act, served to churn the passions between north and south.

[Ohioan]

Your insulting hissing at those who disagree with you confirms my point in replies above. If you can write with such contempt of fellow Americans over what ceased to be an issue over a century & a half ago, it should be obvious why the South thought they could no longer remain in a Union conceived in a once common purpose with comrades in victorious arms in the late 1780s. (By the way, the Fugitive Slave Act was specifically authorized in the Constitution, and was one of the compromises based upon mutual respect.)

While you and I may agree that the feudal/Biblical labor system, which was replaced at various places, before and after the 1860s, around the world, was properly replaced by volitional contracts between employers & employees; that does not change historic facts.

[DiogenesLamp]

If you mean the slave holding states imposing their will upon the rest of the states, I agree wholeheartedly.

Article IV, section 2 was freely agreed to by the ratifiers of the US Constitution.

Claiming it was imposed on them is dishonest.

The degree to which the slavers imposed the Peculiar Institution either directly, in the case of border states and new states or indirectly, as in the case of the Fugitive Slave Act, served to churn the passions between north and south.

The fugitive slave law was created as a patch for states refusing to abide by the constitutional charter they signed. It was an effort by congress to make them abide by Article IV, section 2.

They still didn't want to uphold their obligation under the constitution.