Tinkerpeach
Member
I have little doubt this is true, but the fact remains that slavery was the primary casus belli for the Civil War. The focus on "states rights" is a means of avoiding the fact that the South went to war in order to keep slavery and the North didn't want it expanded out to the new states coming in.
There were many reasons the South was so concerned about representation in Congress because if the North could pass anything they wanted the South would have to do it.
At the time the tobacco and Cotten trade was making the South extremely profitable and congress wanted to increase the taxes on their exports.
The Southern democrats blocked it but with more free states coming into the union they knew they would ultimately lose.
There were also issues with education where the North wanted to begin making standards in teaching but the South was comprised of mostly farmers so didn’t put as much priority on that.
Many other issues were also going on at the time which had nothing to do with slavery.
However the big debate with the new states coming in was the slavery issue as the abolitionists were pushing very hard to make them free states and they were far more organized than the Southern supporters were.