A pretty solid book on this very topic: James C. Horton, Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory

Sure; States Rights, if by States' Rights we mean the fundamental and inalienable Right to own people. Though the CSA itself wasn't always too big on the states' rights proposition, for instance, if the CSA had ever annexed any new territory, its constitution makes it clear the state would have slavery, as in no choice to be free instead.

Long story short, people dont remember things the way they really happened. Events like the Civil War even less so. Part of the problem is how we learn about the event; first very simply with easy to recognize heroes and villains, which then suddenly becomes more complicated as we get older and find that some of the heroes had more complicated relationships with race than we like to imagine and that all the actors were products of their time with sometimes competing or conflicting goals. Most people end right there; stuck with the view and one reinforced by popular history/imagination that the former good guys were fighting to preserve the Union and the bad guys were fighting to preserve their unique aristocratic culture. They also feel smart knowing that there were many different pressures-- all of which circle the issue of slavery.

The problem is the focus on the reasons the North/Union fought in the war- the over focus on this leads people to paint the south as heroic defenders and falls into the pit of "Gone with the Wind." Really, any attention at all to discourses from the South makes it painfully obvious what was at the center of the fight and slavery has everything to do with it. Any cursory glance at the Constitution of the CSA renders the centrality of slavery impossible to ignore.

Anyone who claims the victors write history has never studied the US Civil War.

As for myself, because I believe positionality to be important here; I come from the South and grew up hearing and espousing the line that things were in fact more complicated. I wanted to believe statues I saw were of noble and heroic people. It was only when I read their words that I realized an important part of the story had been largely omitted or muted.

The Confederates said it was slavery, in as many words. They acted, through the whole course of the war, as if they fought for slavery. Only after losing did they decide that they had, unbeknownst to their four years' younger selves, that they'd fought for something else. You can go read the declarations of causes that South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas published. You can dig through the things that the secession commissioners said to state legislatures (note: only slave states seceded and they only saw fit to dispatch commissioners to other slave states, an odd course indeed if they believed the prerogatives of states in general were in peril rather than those of particular states to do particular things) to try to get them on board. There you will find plenty of talk about how the nature of the Constitution permits secession and how states have that right.

...but that's not really a cause, unless the argument is that the South pitched a civil war just because felt they could. I've read some pretty cavalier stuff about how they expected to win the whole business in a day or two. James Chesnut (husband of Mary Boykin, the famous diarist) promised that he would personally drink all the blood shed. But one doesn't hazard war just for the hell of it. If Southerners really believed they had a constitutional right to secede, and I think many of them had talked themselves into it by 1860, then they still need a reason why. They gave one and made no bones about it: they wanted to keep their slaves. Mississippi insisted that

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. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

I don't know how they could make it any less ambiguous, short of hiring people to hunt down anybody arguing it was all about states rights and shout corrections. But let's set aside the plain text for a moment and look at context.

The same people spent literally decades prior fretting about disunion. It was a specter haunting every sectional crisis: This courts the ruin of the nation, the end of the American experiment in republican self-government. It was a threat: If we are not given satisfaction, then we must consider the ultimate remedy and all its hazards. It was an accusation: You are driving us to disunion! or You are plotting against us, you dirty traitors! And it became a process: By endless agitation and controversy, the sections have become alienated from one another. How long can such a rift endure? And only fairly late in the antebellum (just where is necessarily depends on what milestones one considers most important and what constitutes popular enough) did it become widely considered as a program: Screw this Union, we're out. By convention, you raised the specter of disunion not as a suggested course of action but rather one you hoped to prevent and prayed would never come. Not the kind of thing you do just to prove a constitutional point, even leaving aside the war that most everyone had spent decades expecting should disunion be tried. It took those decades, if with quite an acceleration toward the end, to wear down that convention to the point where the once unthinkable became something that South Carolina dared.

Say we don't have those smoking gun documents. We still don't have a good states rights argument because states rights' isn't a cause in itself. It's a method used to attain policy goals. One want states to have particular powers because you either trust them to do as you wish with those powers, do not expect the national government to use the powers in ways that suit you, or (most often) both. So we must ask the standard question: states rights for what?

There are two answers for that. The first is tautological: states rights for states rights. That still leaves us bereft of a reason, as it tells you nothing about why either people in general or the particular historical actors in question preferred states rights. It's less an answer than a refusal to answer, a dressed up equivalent of "just because". (Occasionally you hear arguments here about tariffs, but they rarely come up in secession winter arguments and even back when they were an issue, were one deeply and consciously inflected with slavery.)

But, still leaving aside the abundant documentary record, we have many facts not in dispute which point strongly to slavery as the central issue.

1. Only slave states seceded. If either the then-present national government or the one to be inaugurated come March of '61 aimed to enact some kind of general plan to abolish the states or otherwise radically centralize the United States, then you would expect conservatives all over the nation to be up in arms about it.

2. The slave states that didn't secede, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, were the ones least invested in slavery as of 1860. Delaware had more free blacks than slaves by a large margin. Maryland's black population were half free. Kentucky and Missouri did somewhat better, from a slaveholding perspective, but both were host to intermittent, if not particularly successful, efforts to curtail the institution (KY) or to outgrow it through immigration (MO). Both states also ended up with breakaway Confederate governments.

3. The states that did secede (or claimed to) actually did so in rough order of slavery demographics. South Carolina and Mississippi, with their enslaved majorities, bolted first. The rest of the Cotton Kingdom (Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Texas) followed in relatively short order. It's an awfully big coincidence that the most enslaved region of the country so uniformly chose to bolt the Union all at once if slavery had nothing to do with it.

4. The Upper South (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas) dallied. These states considered following the Deep South out, but rejected the idea at first. They went after Lincoln chose to use force to keep the Union together. You can reach a little and say that's states rights, but you're right back to the same problem. William W. Freehling argues that they avowed the right to withdraw their consent as a kind of quasi-states rights rationale, but he's very forthright in pointing out that each state had a sizable contingent committed to secession before any shots fired and nobody pretends that when push really came to shove, these states broke North. For that you have to go to the Border South. They understood themselves as part of the South and were invested in the section as a whole both culturally, as a slaveholding people, and economically. To put it bluntly: the Cotton Kingdom needed more slaves and the Upper South, thanks to the decline of tobacco, had more than it needed. They found new riches supplying enslaved labor down the river, as it were. That they chose to deny their consent in order to come to the defense of fellow slaveholding states, rather than over some other manner (including several antebellum suppresions of state power about which much more could be said) really seals the deal.

5. In that period between the Lower South taking a powder and the Upper South following, the first states out dispatched commissioners to convince other states to follow them. If they had some kind of general states rights interest, then we might expect them to dispatch people to every state in the Union they could hope to reach. Maybe no one would go to California, but it wouldn't have taken heroic efforts to dispatch secession commissioners to Indiana or New Jersey. Yet they chose to dispatch men only to other slaveholding states. Why would they refuse to do so, unless they really wanted to ensure no free state had any interest in coming?

You can turn that around and say that they knew already no free state would want on board, but then we end up in the same place. Why would a government erected on states rights and against a centralizing power in Washington appeal so narrowly to just the slave states? Such an omission is on its own extremely suspicious unless everybody North and South knew full well that the cause of the Confederacy was slavery, but put it in with the rest and you at least have a very strong circumstantial case for slavery.

(more in a moment)

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