TL;DR:
The Southern States had no issue enforcing federal law to impose their will upon Northern States and did so time and time again. The Confederacy had no qualms in including into their Constitution that slavery would be mandatory in all involved states. That alone, in my conjecture, proves that the fallback of fighting for some abstract notion of states rights vs federal rights is bogus. However there was a political divide, there was economic divide, there was cultural divide between the North and South and that is where disunion came from; but all of those divides were rigidly centered around slavery. This is best explained in the posts linked below and the bits I've singled out.
Regardless here are some links from our FAQ on this subject and relevant bits I'd want to share:
When people say that Lincoln fought to free the slaves, or that the war was fought purely over slavery, that is wrong and/or an oversimplification. When people say that slavery caused the Civil War, however, that is completely correct. All the major points of sectional tension, whether social, political, economic, etc, that were significant enough to drive the nation apart can be traced definitively back to slavery and its respective presence/absence. However, people went to war in 1861 primarily because of their desire to either preserve the Union or enforce secession.
Slavery intersects in the South in the war because it was their primary motivation for seceding. States' Rights rhetoric was by and large a mechanism for preserving slavery rather than the primary concept/institution for which they fought. The South had been all too happy to abandon the sanctity to states' rights when it suited them in the past.
Essentially, the war started over disunion: The South wanted to dissolve the Union and the North was willing to fight to preserve it. The war was caused by slavery. Essentially all the differences which were large enough to affect the conflict were rooted in the relative presence or absence of slavery: the social differences, the economic interests, the states' rights argument, the political interests, everything. But more than that, both the North and the South were fighting over their interpretation of the legacy of the Constitution and the Founding Fathers. Each society had a different perspective on what principles the country was founded upon, and when the war broke out both sides believed they were protecting the legacy of the American Revolution. This is why the Civil War is sometimes referred to as the Second American Revolution.
There was nothing moral about the start of the war, though moral elements were injected as the war raged on. Just like the South, the North was largely populated by racist pieces of shit. Black people were persecuted pretty much everywhere, aside from a few isolated pockets (usually in New England) where they got okay treatment. This does not mean that the North supported slavery, it just changes the reason for why the opposed it. The North, subscribing to a Free Labor ideology which stressed the ability of a person to build his livelihood up through hard work, fought hard to keep pathways to economic independence open. This meant maintaining opportunities for social mobility and economic opportunity open. While methods and commitment to this varied (always does), this generally meant advocating internal improvements, tariffs to protect businesses, and most importantly keeping new lands in the West available for settlement. Likewise, this ideology led to a distaste for Southern society, because Southern society stressed hierarchy; a lot of the South was stratified between planter and yeoman classes, and of course slaves. This was seen as denying opportunities for economic independence, thus it ran counter to Northern values. Further, Northerners were petrified that slave labor, if allowed into the West, would compete and drive out free labor. As such, the South wasn't just keeping itself unfree, it was threatening to keep the North unfree by taking up Western lands.
. . .
As this grip of power began to slip for a variety of reasons, including the rise of the Republican Party and Lincoln's election, the unpopularity of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the relative decline in the Southern-backed Democratic party, the South began to perceive (credible) threats to its long term ability to preserve slavery both where it existed, and in the West. This compelled them to attempt to separate from the Union. While they cloaked their reasoning in rhetoric of states' rights, the only right they were interested in protecting was slavery (which isn't evil or trivial to say: slavery was at the very core of their value system). In the antebellum era the South had repeatedly thrown states' rights out the window when where suited them and championed it whenever it was useful to them. The North, staunchly committed to national unity and rejecting the right of secession, viewed the South's actions as rebellion and destructive to the Constitution, and were willing to fight to defend against the rebels. Slavery, while a casualty of the war, was not what the North was (initially) fighting for.
I would also like to bring General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse by Joseph Glatthaar to the stand:
Even more revealing was their attachment to slavery. Among the enlistees in 1861, slightly more than one in ten owned slaves personally. This compared favorably to the Confederacy as a whole, in which one in every twenty white persons owned slaves. Yet more than one in every four volunteers that first year lived with parents who were slaveholders. Combining those soldiers who owned slaves with those soldiers who lived with slaveholding family members, the proportion rose to 36 percent. That contrasted starkly with the 24.9 percent, or one in every four households, that owned slaves in the South, based on the 1860 census. Thus, volunteers in 1861 were 42 percent more likely to own slaves themselves or to live with family members who owned slaves than the general population.
The attachment to slavery, though, was even more powerful. One in every ten volunteers in 1861 did not own slaves themselves but lived in households headed by non family members who did. This figure, combined with the 36 percent who owned or whose family members owned slaves, indicated that almost one of every two 1861 recruits lived with slaveholders. Nor did the direct exposure stop there. Untold numbers of enlistees rented land from, sold crops to, or worked for slaveholders. In the final tabulation, the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery. For slaveholder and nonslaveholder alike, slavery lay at the heart of the Confederate nation. The fact that their paper notes frequently depicted scenes of slaves demonstrated the institution's central role and symbolic value to the Confederacy.
This is brought up a bit preemptively as the common argument brought up, especially by my fellow Southerners, is that the 'common man' did not fight over slavery or had any connection to slavery. This passage is meant to show otherwise. Even those smaller portion who were not likely to have owned slaves or lived in homes with slaves would have been directly reliant on the slave driven economy; the entire Southern economic system was centered around slave labor fueling agricultural output and everyone had something to lose by its disappearance as an institution.
A few answers from the FAQ would be a good place to start:
Your Opinion: How accurate is it to say the Civil War was fought over slavery?
Causes of the American Civil War?
Civil War: Slavery or States Rights?
As for slavery having little to do with the war, or the Confederates being in favor of "state's rights" (the right to do what, exactly?) let's look at a few secession documents. Here's South Carolina's:
But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. [...] Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.
Here they complain that free states aren't following the laws of Constitution (specifically, the Fugitive Slave Act) in deference to their own state laws. Kind of blows the Confederacy's pro-state's right argument away.
Mississippi is also not shy with their love for slavery:
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.
Here's Texas as well:
She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery--the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits--a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.
Then there's Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens' Cornerstone Speech, in which he explicitly calls slavery the "immediate cause" of the Civil War and states unequivocally:
Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.
It's hard to say that slavery was not a major factor, if not the major factor, in pushing the country towards civil war. The South, as a few of the FAQ answers get into, had been quite aggressive in pushing for national protections for slavery and, according to their own secession documents, they were quite worried about anti-slavery sentiment in the North. These documents (along with the Confederate Constitution which states: The Confederate States may acquire new territory [...] In all such territory, the institution of negro slavery as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress, and by the territorial government") demonstrate that slavery was definitely one of their most cherished institutions.
This submission has been removed because it is soapboxing, promotion of a political agenda, or moralizing. We don't allow content that does these things because they are detrimental to unbiased and academic discussion of history.