Glad you brought that up. Let's just talk about practical business matters for a moment.
As a practical business matter, the South could not free its slaves. To free the slaves meant bankruptcy.
Instead, the South worked very hard to ensure that a balance between the number of slave and free states was maintained when new states joined the Union. This was driven by practical business considerations: they knew that eventually the free states would outnumber the slave states to the extent that slavery would be Constitutionally abolished.
It's worth repeating: left to their own devices, most new states would have been created as free states. It is rather telling that those worthy advocates of "states rights" worked so hard to ensure that new states could be forced to be slave states -- and that they considered slavery a good enough reason to leave the union.
One is hard-pressed to defend a group of people who are willing not only to maintain slavery, but to spread it. And with that in mind, the underlying reason for this particular act of secession is a rather damnable excuse for secession, whether or not it be legal.
And since the North made its money off the South (whose economy was most of the U.S. economy) through its manufactures and operating the ports of Philadelphia and New York, the Abolitionists' demands to the South that they manumit, amounted to a demand that the South make its tally of bricks without any straw.
On the other hand, maybe I don't like you.......so, we need to change national policy so you will go broke. Don't you agree?
Instead, the South worked very hard to ensure that a balance between the number of slave and free states was maintained when new states joined the Union.
Converse also true. Webster and John Quincy Adams opposed admitting Texas to the Union.
This was driven by practical business considerations: they knew that eventually the free states would outnumber the slave states to the extent that slavery would be Constitutionally abolished.
Someone offered the interesting arithmetic that there was no way the anti-Southern faction could admit a large enough number of anti-slavery states to the Union to guarantee passage of an abolition amendment to the Constitution.
Nevertheless, I take your point. But slavery wasn't the only issue in play; there were also the Tariffs of 1824 and 1828 (the Tariff of Abominations), which were odious to the South and West. Interesting, isn't it, how the slavery issue split the anti-tariff states? I've always thought that slavery was cultivated as a wedge issue by pro-tariff Eastern Whigs. I haven't seen the evidence yet, though, that would corroborate my suspicion.
It's worth repeating: left to their own devices, most new states would have been created as free states.
How do you know that? That certainly wasn't the case in Texas, and there was more than one side to the issue in Kansas. The slaveholders who immigrated to Kansas and participated in the Lecompton convention had just as much right to have done so as John Brown and his sons......of course, they're now wrong by teleology, and American history has taken Lincoln's view of Lecompton.
Lincoln didn't go to Kansas, but he sent money (with the proviso that it not be used to support violent protest), which tells us how strongly he felt about it, that Kansas should be a freesoil state, notwithstanding that it lay due west of Missouri, one of the fourteen or fifteen slave states.
It is rather telling that those worthy advocates of "states rights" worked so hard to ensure that new states could be forced to be slave states -- and that they considered slavery a good enough reason to leave the union. [Emphasis added]
I think you're coloring things -- "forced" how? Under "popular sovereignty", people were supposed to vote on it. "Forced", as in, John Brown?
And as far as the South's leaving the Union, that was impelled as much by the pure hatred that was pouring out of the North as by anything else, and by the suspicion that the Republicans would build a national political machine whose sole purpose would be to enable Lincoln to take back his promises not to disturb slavery in the South. He hated slavery -- and he'd have taken those promises back in a heartbeat, just as fast as he suspended habeas corpus. He couldn't get an amendment passed, but he would be bound to try anyway. How can you blame the South for not sticking around to see how their enemies planned to compass their destruction? And I emphasize the word "enemies".
One is hard-pressed to defend a group of people who are willing not only to maintain slavery, but to spread it.
Your judgement of them a posteriori would sound more reasoned if you criticized equally bitterly the industrial magnates who worked their men twelve hours a day and paid them peanuts, who wouldn't let women work, who wouldn't let women vote, and who broke unions every chance they got.
If you're going to judge people who lived in the past by the values of the present, please be consistent. Otherwise I might have to conclude that you harbor a sectional grudge against the South that has nothing to do with slavery, and everything to do with people who can't "talk right" and who consistently fail to "git thar mahnds raht!"
That movie, by the way, made as a caricature of the South, was shot in Iowa. Now there is moral courage for you.
And the people who "spread slavery" -- how did they do that? They emigrated from the Old South to Texas and New Mexico, and beyond the Indian Territory to Kansas. What were they supposed to do? Stay home? And why were they supposed to accept fewer rights than Northerners, and second-class citizenship? Why shouldn't they pick up and move if they felt like it?
They had the right to own people, and when they moved, to take them with them. It was in the Constitution. It's unfortunate that slavery makes economic sense, and that you can't make a case against it in finance; that's why it's making a comeback, now that the British Empire has receded. We need laws against slavery and union-busting to ensure that employers share the value of work products equitably: Milton Friedman himself has said that labor syndicalism is absolutely necessary to mass participation in prosperity and the growth of the American middle class. Otherwise, employers will always be able to bargain down wages -- and so they will.
But in 1860, there was indeed chattel slavery and there were no unions. And absent a national reform movement to raise up labor, I think that the abolition of slavery has to be seen for what it in effect was: a dog-in-the-manger move by Northern industrialists, acting through first the Whig and then the Republican Party, and finally the United States Army, to beggar the Southern agriculturalist leadership and crush opposition to the Millocracy's self-enrichment at the expense of the rest of the country. Which last is exactly what happened during the Gilded Age.