Not every civil war's sole focus is taking over the existing government.
We get the term from classical antiquity, and its use among the Romans.
The Romans used it to describe both wars that were waged to overthrow the government entirely, or to alienate territory from the government.
The US Civil War clearly fits into the latter category.
The issue in the Civil War was not slavery in the Southern slave states.
It was the extension of slavery into Federal territories and the violation of free state statutes that precipitated the Confederate attack on the Union which began the war.
Not following your thinking. You contend the Confederates attacked the Union in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, er, I mean the Fort Sumter incident, in order to extend slavery into Federal territories and to continue (I suppose) the violation of free state statutes. How would a Confederate victory have accomplished those things?
I highly recommend that anybody interested in the matter read Lincoln's First Innaugural Address, then the Gettysburg Address and finally the short and sweet Second Innaugural Adddress.
“The Romans used it to describe both wars that were waged to overthrow the government entirely, or to alienate territory from the government.”
The second category doesn’t fit either. The South seceded peacefully and was governing itself, and then the war started after that, as a war between two sovereign nations.
“It was the extension of slavery into Federal territories and the violation of free state statutes that precipitated the Confederate attack on the Union which began the war.”
Nonsense, it was the refusal of the Union to remove its troops from Confederate territory, and the attempt by the Union to resupply those troops in defiance of the Confederacy that precipitated the attack. The South had no interest in what happened with regards to slavery in Federal territories by the time the war began, because they had already left the Union.
The opposite was, in fact, true.
The feigned apprehension of the Northern Abolitionists and their allies, such as Lincoln, that Southern slaveholders would begin to flock northward and westward with their slaves ignored the clear historical fact that slavery had already died out in the Northern States and that the slave population had shifted almost entirely to the Gulf States.
Josiah J. Evans of South Carolina, stated that slave labor was not suited for the agriculture of the Territories: “There is no pretense that any one of the great staples that constitute the great material of our foreign commerce, can be cultivated anywhere within the limits of these Territories outside of the Territory of Kansas.”
There was absolutely no reason at all for Southern owners to move North with their slaves, and they had no inclination to do so. There was also no real inclination for most slaveholders to migrate into the Territories: They demanded a right which they could not actively use — the legal right to carry slaves where few would or could be taken. The one side fought obsessively for what it was bound to get without fighting; the other, with equal rancor, contended for what in the nature of things it could never use.
Consequently, the whole controversy over the expansion of slavery into the territories became a politically contrived issue.
Slavery was dying in the rest of the world. It had little chance of spreading further into new territories of the continent. It had reached the limits imposed on its expansion by geography and climate, as Kansas, New Mexico, and Utah amply showed. The census of 1860 revealed that there were precisely two slaves in Kansas, and only a handful more in all the remaining territories.
Even the Congressional Republicans had recognized that slavery posed no real threat in the territories, when, early in 1861, they provided for the organization of the new territories of Colorado, Nevada, and Dakota without any ban on slavery.
North and South were not divided by their mutual racism. Slavery was not a genuine issue and there was no need to go to war over it. The men of 1860-1 allowed an academic argument about an imaginary slave in an impossible place to end in a bloody civil war.
If the question was merely one of slavery in the territories, then competent political leadership would have been able to cope with it. Instead, the Northern political class, seeing that the South was steadily becoming a minority in the United States, remained frustrated at the South's ability to cling to power. Not merely was the Northern stand against the threat of slavery in the territories a misdirection, but Northern expressions of moral repugnance towards slavery were totalitarian nonsense.
The Republican party was seeking to push the South into minority status, eliminate Constitutional guarantees of freedom and limit their existence to growing crops.
Williams just proved it wasn’t. More to the point, while the Confederate Constitution protected slavery in the places it was currently legal, it made importing slaves ANYWHERE, to ANYWHERE illegal. That meant that slavery as an institution would be pinched off in the South in a generation or two.
That’s better than the Emancipation Proclamation did, and something nobody talks about with respect to the South.
What is absolutely clear from Williams article is that Lincoln was flip-flopping on the idea of state’s rights. In 1846, secession was fine in Texas, as it pertained to Mexico. In 1861, suddenly secession was NOT OK for Texas, since the folks they were walking away from was the US.
And the coup d grace is the stat about where all the Fed money was coming from - tariffs supplied by southern ports. Of the 90% of operating cash, 75% of that cash was coming from the South.
The reason why this wasn’t a civil war was because the FedGov was already violating the 9th and 10th amendments, and knew it. Then they started hostilities.
Remember, Lee had spent 1846 through 1848 helping Texas secede. Lincoln asked him in 1861 to do the opposite. No wonder he turned him down. Lee was there when they marched into Mexico City and raised the US flag over the Mexican capitol.
By free state statutes do you mean the personal liberty laws of the northern states?
Many of those personal liberty laws were clearly unconstitutional. Lincoln's two secretaries Nicolay and Hay in Volume 3 of their book "Abraham Lincoln, A History" noted that a careful 1860 study of the personal liberty laws by the National Intelligencer found that the personal liberty laws of Vermont, Massachusetts, Michigan and Wisconsin were clearly unconstitutional.
Then there is this from some distinguished jurists [Source: Philadelphia Public Ledger newspaper of December 20, 1860, my bold below]:
THE CITIZENS OF MASSACHUSETTS AND THE PERSONAL LIBERTY BILLS
Chief Justice Shaw, B. R. Curtis, Joel Parker, and other citizens of Massachusetts equally distinguished, have addressed a letter to the people of that State on the Personal Liberty Bills, which they declare to be unconstitutional. They urge strongly the repeal of them and say:
We know it is doubted by some whether the present is an opportune moment to abrogate them. It is said -- We grant these laws are wrong, but will you repeal them under a threat? We answer no. We would do nothing under a threat. We would repeal them under our own love of right; under our own sense of sacredness of compacts; under our own convictions of the inestimable importance of social order and domestic peace; under our feeling of responsibility to the memory of our fathers and the welfare of our children, and not under any threat. We would not be prevented from repealing them by any conduct of others, if such repeal were in accordance with our own sense of right.
He who refuses to do a right thing merely because he is threatened with evil consequences, acts in subjection to the threat. His false pride may enable him to disregard the threat, but he lacks the courage to despise the wrong estimate of his own conduct, which conduct he knows would spring from his own love of duty. If every right-minded man must admit that he ought to govern his own conduct by these principles, are they applicable to the conduct of a great and populous State? On what ground can it be maintained that hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens are to be subjected to suffering, because the false pride of their rulers refuses to do right? Mankind have been afflicted long enough and grievously enough by commotions and strifes and wars springing from such causes. We had hoped that the nature of our government would protect us from swelling the great sum of human misery, produced by the evil passions of rulers. We had hoped that, inasmuch as the masses of people can have no interest but to do right, they would have the discernment to perceive and the manliness to do it, and would be too calm, too wise, too magnanimous intentionally to persevere in any wrong, and we hope so still.
But what is meant by the exhortation not to repeal these laws under a threat? Who threatens us if they should not be repealed?
Whatever may have been true in the past, whatever faults of speech and action may have been committed on the one side or the other, we firmly believe that the men from whom the worst consequences to our country and ourselves are likely to proceed, have no wish that these laws should be repealed, and no disposition to use any threats in reference to them. On the contrary, they desire to have them stand as conspicuous and palpable breaches of the national compact by ourselves; and as affording justification to themselves, to the world and to posterity, for the destruction of the most perfect and prosperous government which the Providence of God has ever permitted the wisdom of man to devise.
By the way, Shaw was Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court from 1830 to 1860. Curtis had been an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court who had resigned from the Court in 1857 in protest of Taney's Dred Scott decision. Parker had been the Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court, and he taught law at Harvard.
Perhaps you misunderstand the term "States Rights." It does not mean that a state can use unconstitutional laws to thwart the Constitution, and then object that someone or the federal government was violating their unconstitutional state statutes.