Instead of secession and war, the South would have done far better to have remained in the Union and gotten the best deal possible. A long delay in and compensation for emancipation would have avoided the worst economic losses and permitted the creation of new arrangements in which the slaves were freed, educated, and given a start as sharecroppers, small farmers, and tradesmen. Given the human and material costs of the Civil War, not just the South but the entire country would have been better off if secession and military conflict had been avoided.
Why didn't the South seek to make a deal instead of going to war? The prideful and unrealistic slaveholder planter class insisted that slavery was a positive good and led the South to the catastrophic folly of secession and toxic dreams of an expansion of slavery. As the saying goes though, it was a rich man's war, but a poor man's fight, and in Appalachia, the Alabama hill country, and other areas inhospitable to plantations, popular sentiment was pro-Union.
After the war, Southern memoirists, propagandists, and historians spun the great tale of the Lost Cause and of the antebellum South as the land of content, well-cared for slaves owned by refined, aristocratic planters -- done in by the grubby, industrialized North and a scheming, tyrannical Lincoln.
Notably, Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government were also accused of grabbing power at the expense of the Confederate states. The resistance to central power was effective enough to hamper the full mobilization and deployment of the South's resources. As one Southern general warned, the Confederacy's obituary would read that it had died of state's rights.
The notion that slavery was just a side issue is amazingly weird and counter-historical.
In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, 21 hours if I remember correctly between two of the most effective politicians in America, they talked about almost nothing else. Odd for a backburner issue.
In Lincoln’s 1st Inaugural, he talked mostly about slavery and the possibly approaching war. Strange if slavery wasn’t really an issue.
The Democratic Party split, twice, in 1860 specifically over the issue of whether a federal slave code should be imposed on the territories. But that was really a minor issue compared to tariffs and such.
In Bleeding Kansas they were really shooting at each other over tariff rates. John Brown hacked up five proslavery settlers encourage passage of the Morrill Tariff.
I believe every single state that seceded proclaimed the protection of slavery to be its primary reason. Several, I believe, mentioned nothing else. But of course there were really other, unmentioned, far more important reasons behind secession and war.
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