[MNJohnnie]

Just read the original article of succession from South Carolina. At the start the South said it was about slavery and the North said it was about preserving the Union.

Confederate States of America - Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp

[Verginius Rufus]

South Carolina was the most extreme of the Deep South states ("too small to be a nation and too large for an insane asylum"). Some of the first seven states to secede (politically dominated by the planter class) may have framed secession in terms of protecting slavery, but the four states which seceded after Fort Sumter did so because of Lincoln's determination to coerce the seceded states back into the Union.

Lincoln did not make ending slavery the basis of his call for troops after Fort Sumter, because he did not want to drive the other slaveholding states (especially Kentucky and Maryland) into seceding. He might have had much less success in getting volunteers to fight if he had announced abolition of slavery as the goal.

Most of the Confederate soldiers were not slaveowners. Why were they willing to risk their lives for the Confederacy? Most of them believed it was their duty to defend their state from the Northern invasion. But not wanting to be in the same country with the Yankees may have been part of it.

[cuban leaf]

At the start the South said it was about slavery...

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I think for them slavery was the catalyst. It was not about slavery any more than those of us against vaccine mandates would say it’s about the vaccine. It’s about the mandates. And for the south I think it was about the Union telling them how to live their lives as well. In this case it would be trying to abolish slavery.

What’s interesting is that slavery was actually going away on its own. It was becoming too expensive and many of the menial jobs they did were becoming automated.

And the solution the north brought after the war only kept them oppressed. I especially find the “40 acres and a mule” thing darkly comical. Why not a horse? Simple. A few blacks could get together and use their horses to sire all the horses they want. Mules are steril. You have a mule until it dies. Then you have nothing. They may as well have given them sacks of AMD seeds that produce edible, but sterile crops.

[skepsel]

I believe the Confederate state legislatures passed ordinances of secession, not articles.