By the time the South secceeded the USA had already been "Balkanized" to the point that there could be no peaceful reconciliation. Individuals viewed themselves as "northerners" or "southerners" before viewing themselves as Americans; when before they viewed themselves as "Marylanders" or "Pennsylvanians", etc...
Slavery was only a part of the issue - economics was the driving force behind the war. I even remember a quote from Lincoln regarding fearing the northern banks more than the abolitionists and the south....people that jump on these threads and decry slavery, and those who support seccession as racists, and can't get past that horror to evaluate the root causes have bought the revissionist history of the public schools hook, line and sinker. Slavery, while part of the issue and a horrible practice, is a tangential issue that distracts people from what was really going on.
the North's desire to create non-slave states in order to create a larger voting block in Congress (gosh, how similar that sounds to the liberal policies of today)Actually, it is exactly the opposite.
Liberal policies of today attempt to create a larger voting block in Congress by creating slaves- slaves to them and the government. Similarly, conservatives are trying to create a larger voting block in Congress by trying to stem that tide.
But in terms of the time before the Civil War, if you are trying to tell me that it was wrong of the North to desire to create non-slave states in order to create a larger voting block in Congress, I will say that sounds like persuing a reasonable reward for a just cause. Slavery was an abomination and was a blight on the tenets of liberty our nation was founded upon. And I will forever hold a grudge against those Confederate leaders, because it was their wrong-headed insistence on maintaining slavery that has forever damaged the cause of limited Federal government and states rights (the post-Civil War philosophical battle about the role of the Federal government has been lost because the issue of slavery drowns out everything else).
Gosh, it sounds like you can't get away from the Southern concern with the extension and preservation of slavery. Areas settled by Southerners would vote with the South on issues like the tariff. Why was it necessary that they have slavery too?
The truth is that Southerners from Jefferson and Jackson on had learned how to get their way by making common cause with the agrarians of the West and the workers and later ethnic minorities of the Eastern cities. This strategy had kept the low tariff Democrat party in power for most of the time up until 1860. What happened to change this? The answer was that Southern demands for the extension of slavery to the territories and its protection through fugitive slave legislation alienated many of the South's natural sympathizers in other regions. The South threw away its victories on the tariff question to pursue the defense of slavery. Congress passed higher tariffs only after seven states had seceded.
It sounds like a nice idea to blame the war on cultural or economic differences, but just which differences were bitter enough to lead to war? Why could this particular war have occured when it did without the explosive issue of slavery? It's in the nature of things to resolve questions of taxation politically where political institutions exist and all are represented. The war may have happened because North and South were two radically different societies with different economic bases, but one has to consider that slavery was a large part of that basis in one region, and much of the difference can be traced to its existence.
Why did the war happen when it did, rather than fifty years earlier, or fifty or one hundred years later? What was it about the 1850s and 1860s that made the atmosphere so poisonous? Why didn't differences between the industrialized East and agricultural West lead to war? Why was the Middle West so firmly in the Northern camp, rather than with their agraarian brothers to the South?
Of course not every Southerner fought for slavery, most, like soldiers in every war fought for home and family. Most Northern soldiers fought for the same reasons. The North as a whole, fought not for abolition but for the Union, as did many Unionists from the South itself, but that doesn't mean that slavery was less important.
Some would like to see the war as part of an eternal struggle between North and South. It can be seen in that light. But it does pay to understand that when you say "Our Southern way of life" now and when Davis said it in 1861, there were different implications. It's not just an unchanging our side against their side. Davis's and ours are two very different worlds.
Someone may deliver fine words about Bush threatening "our rights" or "our way of life." Maybe he's right and maybe he's wrong. I'd have to find out first just what rights and what way of life he was talking about, rather than assume that he was talking sense. If he talked about seceding to protect our right to secede, I'd have to look into things a lot more closely to see if there was anything real at the bottom of the rhetoric.
Of course, every war has more than one cause or reason. We can state the reason for the Second World War and the Holocaust in two words -- Adolph Hitler -- yet historians write thousands of pages and millions of words each year trying to explain just exactly why and how war and genocide came. About as much ink has been spent on the Civil War with no end in sight. But it's hardly possible to write a history of the origins of that war without mentioning slavery, and all the conflicts surrounding slavery carry more weight than those involving tariffs.
One can point to a lot of arrogance, ill-will and folly North and South, but questions of praise or blame or guilt or shame come afterwards, and shouldn't influence our trying to find out what happened, why and how.