Shani:
The impending election of Lincoln, (they knew it was inevitable) who got no EC votes from the slave states at all, was a direct affront to their rights to live as they choose... Imagine if the NE and West Coast felt like that today... Previous Presidents maintained a balance between pro and anti slavery states. The election of Lincoln was seen as a contract violation which made the constitution void.
Quote:
"The South at all times demanded nothing but equality in the common territories, equal enjoyment of them with their property, to that extended to Northern citizens and their property -- nothing more. They said, we pay our part in all the blood and treasure expended in their acquisition. Give us equality of enjoyment, equal right to expansion -- it is as necessary to our prosperity as yours."
"The country has expanded to meet this growing want, and Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, have received this increasing tide of African labor; before the end of this century, at precisely the same rate of increase, the Africans among us in a subordinate condition will amount to eleven millions of persons.
"What shall be done with them? We must expand or perish. We are constrained by an inexorable necessity to accept expansion or extermination. Those who tell you that the territorial question is an abstraction ... are both deaf and blind to the history of the last sixty years. ...
"The North understand it better -- they have told us for twenty years that their object was to pen up slavery within its present limits -- surround it with a border of free States, and like the scorpion surrounded with fire, they will make it sting itself to death."
Robert Toombs, Member of Georgia Legislature and future Confederate Secretary of
State:
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Basically said, they were pissed that the North wanted to exclude slavery from the territories and effectively corral the south as the slavery states. This is a problem because the black population was growing. A corral would leave them with no outlet for this growing population. The south was becoming wary of what happened in Haiti, where the slaves rose up and utterly slaughtered the whites of the island.
There’s your reason for secession