Cause of the Civil War: States’ Rights or Slavery?

“The Civil War was about states’ rights and not about slavery,” is a perennial protest.Those making this argument contend that eleven southern states seceded from the union and went to war against the country–the United States of America–to assert their rights to operate as they pleased.

Let’s look at the data. There is a document, The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States, in which each of five states—Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia—lays out the reason they were seceding. In its document, Mississippi states quite forthrightly,
“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—
the greatest material interest of the world,” and they continue with the assertion
that “products [of slavery] have become necessities of the world, and a blow
at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.” And it goes on to complain,
“It [the federal government] advocates negro equality, socially and politically…”
Another statement made later in the Mississippi Causes document:
“..we must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property [i.e., slaves]
worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union…”

In its document, labelled Declaration of the Immediate Cases Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union, South Carolina complains that
“A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.”

South Carolina goes on to mention slavery 18 times in a statement of 2,186 words, in which they mention the right(s) of states only six times. Georgia mentions slavery 26 times in its document, with no mention of the right(s) of states. Texas mentions slavery 22 times and only mentions states’ rights four times. Overall these five states mention slavery 74 times and states’ rights 12 times.

What the data say: To those states seceding from the Union, slavery was more important than states’ rights.The states’ rights argument might be more credible if stated “Southern states seceded from the union and went to war against the country over their assumed rights to do as they wished about slavery.”