First,leave the morality of slavery aside. I do not and nobody I know will argue that it is not a blight on the soul of humanity. It has been a terrible evil since slavery was first conceived all those long millennia ago but to better understand the times of the pre- Civil War period this larger slavery question must be set aside.
It was much more an economic issue than a state's rights issue at this juncture.
At the time slavery was legal in the United States and it was a business proposition. Slaves were viewed as personal property.
Large southern slaveholders had huge amounts of their money invested in the slaves. A runaway slave represented a major business loss. As the abolition movement gained steam the large slave owners came under increasingly more pressure and their fiscal losses mounted.
Absolutely agree, and whenever I've said that slavery was the primary cause behind the Civil War, I meant the threat to the economics of slavery in regards to the South. The morality of slavery was behind a lot of things in the North, but the South was viewing economic ruin for not only slaveholders but the financial institutions as well. Think Great Depression... The South almost stayed part of the British Empire 90 years earlier due to attempts by the Founders to end slavery with the founding of our nation.
But the Fugitive Slave Act (and many other federal maneuvers) still shows, in my mind, that the talk of State's Rights was mostly propaganda put out by the Southern Democrats to rile up the "common" man. Ones who had no slaves but the South needed for political support and soldiers. The wealthy politicians and ruling class had the most to lose, much of the common folk were so bad off that a Great Southern Depression would have hardly been felt. So they needed to make the the average Joe feel threatened by them "Dam Yankees". The South used federal power just as aggressively as the North did prior to the war, but Democrats have always been good at using the "lie often enough and everybody will believe it" strategy and they did it aggressively in the South. Just read the New York Times or watch CNN today, the Dems are still good at it.
The Civil War did end much of the State's Rights due to things like the 14th Amendment, mostly due to Supreme Court decision making (as was said by others) rather than ole Abe directly. Some good things resulted (such as 2A being binding on the State's as a recent example), but far too much power centralized in the federal gov't.
Good thread, btw.
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