use federal power to legitimize slaveholding in Kansas the next year. Only
after they lost control of the executive branch in the 1860 election did slave
owners begin to suggest limiting federal power.
South Carolina’s leaders went on to condemn New York for denying “even
the right of transit for a slave” and other Northern states for letting African
Americans vote. Before the Civil War, these matters were states’ rights.
Nevertheless, South Carolina claimed the right to determine whether New
York could prohibit slavery within New York or Vermont could define
citizenship in Vermont. Carolinians also contested the rights of residents of
other states even to think differently about their peculiar institution, giving as
another reason for secession that Northerners “have denounced as sinful the
institution of slavery.” In short, slavery permeates the document from start to
finish. Of course, the election of Lincoln provided the trigger, but the abiding
purpose of secession was to protect, maintain, and enhance slavery. Nor was
South Carolina unusual; other states used similar language when they seceded.
Despite this clear evidence, before 1970 many textbooks held that almost
anything but slavery—differences over tariffs and internal improvements, the
conflict between agrarian South and industrial North, and especially “states’
rights”—led to secession. This was a form of Southern apologetics.^18 Never
was there any excuse for such bad scholarship, and in the aftermath of the civil
rights movement most textbook authors came to agree with Abraham Lincoln in
his Second Inaugural “that [slavery] was somehow the cause of the war.” As
The United States—A History of the Republic put it in 1981, “At the center of
the conflict was slavery, the issue that would not go away.”
To my surprise, our newest history textbooks have backtracked on this issue.
American Journey states, for example:
Southerners justified secession with the theory of states’
rights. The states, they argued, had voluntarily chosen to enter
the Union. They defined the Constitution as a contract among the
independent states. Now because the national government had
violated that contract—by refusing to enforce the Fugitive
Slave Act and by denying the Southern states equal rights in the
territories—the states were justified in leaving the Union.As we have seen, the national government had not refused to enforce the
Fugitive Slave Act, and states, Northern or Southern, have no “rights in the