Look, all I can speak to is the quality of your engagement with me here. You misread a primary source which plainly states that slave labor was the precipitating issue in the conflict over state's rights which blossomed into open rebellion and bloody war. That doesn't reflect well or poorly on your reading or understanding, but it does reflect poorly on the quality of your intellectual engagement with me.

I agree that we are seeing the same issues play out with abortion, with some states seeking to pass statutes similar to the Fugitive Slave Act to prevent their citizens from obtaining abortion services in neighboring states. If they hold firmly to that perspective, then we may come to an ill end again.

But to hold the opinion that we could avoid a second Civil War by simply honoring states' rights is to willfully ignore history: the political leaders of North and South tested the states' rights framework on the problem of slavery, and it failed.

I quote another primary source, Ulysses S. Grant, who makes this case far more clearly than I can:

For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that "A state half slave and half free cannot exist." All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true.

Slavery was an institution that required unusual guarantees for its security wherever it existed; and in a country like ours where the larger portion of it was free territory inhabited by an intelligent and well-to-do population, the people would naturally have but little sympathy with demands upon them for its protection. Hence the people of the South were dependent upon keeping control of the general government to secure the perpetuation of their favorite institution. They were enabled to maintain this control long after the States where slavery existed had ceased to have the controlling power, through the assistance they received from odd men here and there throughout the Northern States. They saw their power waning, and this led them to encroach upon the prerogatives and independence of the Northern States by enacting such laws as the Fugitive Slave Law. By this law every Northern man was obliged, when properly summoned, to turn out and help apprehend the runaway slave of a Southern man. Northern marshals became slave-catchers, and Northern courts had to contribute to the support and protection of the institution.

This was a degradation which the North would not permit any longer than until they could get the power to expunge such laws from the statute books. Prior to the time of these encroachments the great majority of the people of the North had no particular quarrel with slavery, so long as they were not forced to have it themselves. But they were not willing to play the role of police for the South in the protection of this particular institution.

In the early days of the country, before we had railroads, telegraphs and steamboats—in a word, rapid transit of any sort—the States were each almost a separate nationality. At that time the subject of slavery caused but little or no disturbance to the public mind. But the country grew, rapid transit was established, and trade and commerce between the States got to be so much greater than before, that the power of the National government became more felt and recognized and, therefore, had to be enlisted in the cause of this institution.

> Look, all I can speak to is the quality of your engagement with me here. You misread a primary source which plainly states that slave labor was the precipitating issue in the conflict over state's rights which blossomed into open rebellion and bloody war.

I didn’t misread it, I read it correctly. Others put meaning into the slave debate, at the time this wasn’t as big as we make it today - it was propaganda and the rewriting of history that made it larger. Primary sources at the time definitely emphasize it, but there are a whole plethora of issues. Further, your coming at the discussion from your position in history today; projecting, if you will. At the start of the war and prior to it, there were decades of the north undermining the south. The fact there was a “fugitive slave act” was because of that undermining by the north.

Regardless, what I was trying to convey was a more factual basis for a discussion. Even in this discussion, the judgement is thick. I try not to portray a judgment, rather focusing on factual statements.

Though, to your point I think we mostly agree and I don’t think the civil war was avoidable. I just view it as a much larger conflict than slavery and I think that’s revisionist history to believe it was the primary cause.

From the founding of this country there have been two waring factions — the federalist and the anti-federalist. Rural vs urban. Populist vs elitist. Democrat vs Republican. Effectively, “what is American”.

It hasn’t changed, really. We’re still having the same debates, pro-life or pro-abortion. The idea behind a Republic is we can resolve those differences and allow greater regional freedom. We have mechanisms of government that enable no faction to dominate (though that’s being eroded). The original idea was states would also leave the union if they so chose - which clearly the northern states wouldn’t allow.

Personally, my fear is that we’re sliding into another “hot” period of the civil war. When we can’t resolve differences AND can’t leave, then war is inevitable.

> I didn’t misread it, I read it correctly. Others put meaning into the slave debate, at the time this wasn’t as big as we make it today - it was propaganda and the rewriting of history that made it larger.

The first two paragraphs of South Carolina's articles of secession say, "We are seceding because our constitutional right to own slaves is being violated by northern states."

The outcome of the slave issue had serious consequences for the propertied class in the South, too. Did you know that, apart from Southern slave owners, most slave owners of the era were paid for their slaves when they were freed? Even the citizens of Haiti, who earned their freedom through violent rebellion, were eventually forced to repay France for "stealing" themselves for their owners.

It's not propaganda to point at the words of the slave states; it's propaganda to throw sand in the eyes of people seeking to understand what actually happened. I grew up in Mississippi; I saw the battlefield of Vicksburg as a child, I understand the need to relate to those folks. And I understand the feelings of injustice that well up when you and your community are reductively maligned as being nothing but outright racists, or when a statement like "The Civil War was fought over slavery" is then extrapolated to a statement as obviously untrue as "All southerners fought in the war so that they could preserve slavery."

But southerners are full of self-justifying lies, too.

> The fact there was a “fugitive slave act” was because of that undermining by the north.

And what else was the North to do? Do you believe that slavery is immoral? If a runaway slave hitched a train into your state and knocked on your front door, would you send them back to bondage?

This is why the legal question is a dodge: the moral question speaks too strongly. Read the passage I quoted from Grant again, top to bottom. He is as vivid on the question as any writer I have read. And he was there, and you and I were not.