Ok, nevermind the fact that the South attacked Fort Sumpter, it seems like there was a moral justification and a national justification for the North that made the war inevitable.

Obviously slavery is the moral justification, but if the South successfully seceded, it would no longer be the North's (read: the United States) problem. They would have no business telling anther country what laws to legislature.

The national justification makes sense, probably more so now: to preserve the union. The problem is, the civil war was what made the US so tightly knit. The founders envisioned many different nations unified by a common cause: democracy. They wanted everyone to have a government to fit their locality, but they knew smaller and seperate entities would be weaker and would have a harder time defending against despots and tyrants (remember, France was to our West, England to the North and Spain to the South). The civil war neutered states rights, so before its conclusion, the South had every right and expectation to secede.

So why was slavery and the production based on it, such a big issue that the North fought to destroy the very core of what the country stood for, in the name of preserving it?

 

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Actually Lincoln provoked the attack by lying to the the people of the North and South Carolina. For weeks before the Ft. Sumter incident he publicly stated that he would abandon Ft. Sumter [ Source - Providence Daily Post - 1861 ]

And while the official story presented by Lincoln was the ships he promised not to send were laden with food and supplies, they were in fact warships.

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Actually slavery had very little to do about getting the North into war. It was about crony capitalism ( Thw Whig "American System" ) and the high tariffs placed on the South so that businesses in the North were protected from competition abroad.

Lincoln's acknowledges this in his Innaugual Address

"The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere. "

For the South, the slavery issue was a constitutional issue. Article IV, Section 2 ( before its repeal by the 13th Amendment) stated

"No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."

The use of "nullification" by Northern States to the Fugitive Slave Act which re-enforced the Constitution was the straw for the South since the Northern States were illegally confiscating private property ans wrong as that was becuase of the immorality of slavery but one has to think in the times when this happened to understand the causes of the Civil War...

 

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The North had a moral obligation to free the slaves. Those slaves were Americans and could not be abandoned. Once that was done, the South should have been allowed to secede.

 

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Your summation of the US before the civil war is flawed. It wasn't created as a loose conglomeration of different nations, it was created as a union of like minded people who happened to live in widely divergent locations and terrain whose dream of government and freedom for the average man linked them into a nation.

The COUNTRY was created, as said so eloquently above by Lincoln, to insure the freedom and equality of the common man. It was the duty and obligation of all citizens of that country to protect and cherish that.

When some citizens decided they would rather take what they want from others, ignore the founding tenets of their country, and spit upon the sacrifice of so many who died to create it, then it was the obligation of all other citizens to stop that from happening.

Slavery was the root of the problem, but the war didn't happen to free them. The war happened to keep obscenely wealthy oligarchs from creating a fiefdom that fit their vision of serfdom and oppression to maintain their immense land holdings at the cost of the common man. Slavery was only the most heinous symptom of that problem, not the problem in and of itself.

The US Constitution does not allow any parties of it to secede. It supplanted and wholly replaced the articles of confederation, which called for a loose alliance of separate sovereign nations. It is a Constitution of all people in all states that all have the same rights as every other citizen. Some of the citizens, even a majority of them, can not decide to take away the rights of others in their state and take the whole state into a different form of government. They do NOT have that right. All citizens everywhere are citizens of the USA.

Talk of secession is talk of high treason and the most despicable betrayal of all those who gave their lives to form the USA.

Again no talk of slavery in the context of military action .... Lincoln was a Whig [ Hamiltonian] and was an in-law of the most famous Whig, Henry Clay, and with the South seceding, the tariffs piled on them to keep the special interests [ Northern businesses ] of the Whig/new GOP party were threatened ...

The causes and incidents leading up to the Civil War were many but from the North's perspective ( except for the ridiculed minority of abolitionists there), slavery was not a cause for the War on their side.

 

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The South wanted war and fired the first shot

 

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Fixed for accuracy

 

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Yeah, he should have sent cruise ships to pick up soldiers.

 

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The warships were filled with re-enforcements and more munitions .... but thank you for your acceptance of the facts *I have sourced ....

 

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