While there was much discussion about slavery in regards to federal legislation concerning the conditions upon which future states would be admitted to the union, there was no prominent federal legislation before the start of the war that would have removed slavery in the existing states, therefore, it was not the cause of war from either the Northern or Southern perspectives.
Sadly, what opposition that most Northern legislators had against slavery was not on moral grounds. Their desire was to avoid responsibility for returning runaway slaves as required by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and to eliminate extra representation for the south. Article 1 Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution allowed every five slaves to be counted as three people under the three fifths compromise of the 1787 Constitutional Convention.
President Lincoln claimed that the states had entered into a permanent non revocable contract to form the Union. He emphatically stated in his inaugural address that: "Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy." There is no Constitutional support for such a claim. Nevertheless, Lincoln refused to accept the peaceful succession of any states and initiated what he called a "War of Rebellion" to force "rebels" back into the Union from which they succeeded.
Primary causes that Southerners were willing to fight and die for were to defend the invasion by the north, to affirm their right to succeed from the union, to maintain sovereign power that the states were granted over the federal government in the U.S. Constitution and to allow newly admitted states, not the federal government, determine how they would govern themselves.
President Lincoln's emphatic desire was to "preserve the Union" while southerners wanted to preserve state's rights and powers according to the 10th amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the Articles of Confederation, upon which the U.S. Constitution was based. That is why they were called the Union and Confederate armies, not slaveholder and free man armies.
III. THE MYTH OF SUCESSION AS TREASON
Some Americans have been led to believe succession to be a form of treason that would justify the use of military force but the documents upon which America was founded do not corroborate that view.
The U.S. Constitution does not prohibit succession. Its 10th amendment grants any powers not specified to the states. It declares: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
The right of succession was expressly acknowledged in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, itself a succession document from the British Government. It states: "That w henever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government"."
Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution expressly prohibits a president from engaging in war without a declaration of war issued by the U.S. Congress. Article IX of the Articles of Confederation similarly stated that "The united States in congress shall never engage in a war unless the by the votes of the majority of the united States in congress assembled". No such declaration required under the U.S. Constitution was ever issued by Congress.
Article IX of the Articles of Confederation provided that the United States Congress assembled, "shall have the sole and determining right and power of determining on peace and war except in the cases mentioned in the sixth article". That article prohibited a state from engaging in war unless they were invaded, were the subject of a resolution of war or were in similar imminent danger.
Article IX of the Articles of Confederation further defined that: "The united States in Congress assembled shall also be the last resort on appeal in all disputes and differences now subsisting or that hereafter may arise between two or more States concerning boundary, jurisdiction or any other causes whatever""
Throughout much of the early 1800s, northern states frequently considered succession as their right and President Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, repeatedly and publicly acknowledged their right to peacefully succeed. Abraham Lincoln's predecessor, James Buchanan, his entire cabinet and his Secretaries of War, John Floyd and Joseph Holt, refused to use military force to prevent succession. Only two of Lincoln's cabinet members believed in the use of military force to prevent succession. They were Treasury Secretary, Salmon Chase and Postmaster General, Montgomery Blair, a co-founder of the Republican Party whose father edited the Washington Globe stood to profit from the prestige and power of preserving the Union" Even Alexander Hamilton, who led a charge at Yorktown that defeated the British and whose nationalistic government policies Lincoln eventually implemented by force, denounced the use of such force in Federalist Papers #81 and his 1787 Constitutional Convention speech.
Nevertheless, Abraham Lincoln decided to supplant the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation and previous presidential precedents with unwritten "universal law" and "fundamental law" when he explained in the inaugural address that: " I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments"
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