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But be serious. The northern states "achieved emancipation peacefully," so I don't know what you mean by "that was not even tried here." It was repudiated in the most solemn way as even an ultimate, distant goal by the Southern states who cast their lot with a regime based on slavery, after they had almost a century to think the matter over carefully, and while the rest of the world moved toward emancipation and substantially accomplished it. The civilized world of 1776 was very clear on the moral issues involved in slavery, and the civilized world of 1860 was even clearer -- the South just ILLEGITIMATELY DISAGREED. And they quite openly based their revolt on that disagreement. So let's see what statements by seceeding states you have that a) offer reasons for the justice of secession as an avoidance of tyranny, and b) don't make slavery the principal, even only, cause of secession.

Actually, as pointed out, the whole of the world didn't move away from slavery. It is still alive in much of the world. Africa, the Middle East, much of Asia still practices slavery. Unfortunately, we have a long way to go before we eliminate slavery.

In the places where slavery was abolished, it was almost without exception done peacefully, generally through compensated emancipation or through phasing out slavery over a period of years. And while the Psalms singers like to take credit for ending slavery, it was really simple economics that did the trick. Owning slaves just didn't pay. (We might as well face facts, for many people, if not most, money counts for more than morality.)

Don't think I am defending slavery or defending the South's stance on slavery. But this is not a question of whether slavery was right or wrong. There's no question that slavery is wrong. It is a question of whether people may decide what kind of government they will live under.

By "the rest of the world" I meant the civilized world, or, if you please, Christendom. And it is, to put it mildly, a matter of debate whether the elimination of slavery in that part of the world, and in the places it controlled, was simply an economic matter. Africa, Asia and the Middle East are almost entirely still despotic anyway, so even the distinction between slavery and citizenship can be less clear. Slavery departed from the Western world in the 18th and 19th century principally because that world, in its various ways, considered itself to be attempting to establish justice for the many, and slavery was obviously not consistent with this project.

The point for our discussion, perhaps you will agree, is that those portions of the world making some serious effort to conform their practices to moral law and justice, i.e., Christendom, did eliminate slavery. And they did so as part of what Tocqueville identified as the irresistible force of the doctrine of human equality. The thesis of his book, Democracy in America, is that the tide of human equality was sweeping over the civilized world, and that rather than resist it, the old world should take careful thought how best to order affairs in light of it. I would be interested in what others who have read the history of this time would say about the thesis that emancipation in the British and French empires was entirely an economic phenomenon.

I think the point is that the South was unique, certainly among peoples tracing their political institutions to the Western or Christian civilization, in making a deliberate decision in the 19th century to embrace or defend slavery. In this, they departed diametrically from any society with whom they shared traditional or intellectual connection.