I've read the accounts of how some southerners dreamed of creating a great slave empire around the Caribbean: but I am dubious of the possibility of doing so and even more so of how important a factor that was in the actual decision to secede.
The proximate cause was Lincoln's election, where you had the election of a President whose party was dedicated to abolition.
What do you think the reaction of some states today would be if a Democrat candidate were elected with an openly declared platform of gun confiscation?
The other issue I see that is often terribly confused is that of the rights of freedmen after the Civil War. The Radical Republicans passed amendments using rather dubious methods to enfranchise blacks. Those amendments remained a dead letter for almost a hundred years as soon as Union troops were withdrawn from the South. Why? Because there was only a passion in the North to preserve the Union (and eventually, to end slavery, which was seen as the principal cause of disunion).
But there was no large constituency in either the North or South to enfranchise blacks: they were to be treated more or less as resident aliens.
Probably not far different from the Southern states. There has long been flirting with the idea of secession among various states, the latest being California. I believe that in Texas it has always had a following, or at least for several decades it has had a following.
The other issue I see that is often terribly confused is that of the rights of freedmen after the Civil War. The Radical Republicans passed amendments using rather dubious methods to enfranchise blacks.
They wanted the political power that would come as a result of those votes.
Those amendments remained a dead letter for almost a hundred years as soon as Union troops were withdrawn from the South. Why?
Because without Union troops in place, they couldn't enforce those laws on the unwilling majority.
Why? Because there was only a passion in the North to preserve the Union (and eventually, to end slavery, which was seen as the principal cause of disunion).
There was no passion to even do that until it was ginned up by Lincoln. Most of the North was perfectly content to let the South leave and to let it keep slavery.
But there was no large constituency in either the North or South to enfranchise blacks: they were to be treated more or less as resident aliens.
Exactly right. The constituency which wanted to enfranchise blacks were those Republicans who believed they could gain political power through their votes.
They did a similar thing in the early 1960s, but Lyndon Johnson flipped the script on them.
I suspect that no small reason why Reconstruction was such a short-term and fitful thing was that the North soon realized that most freedmen stayed in the South and had little desire to move North. There was no need to fully remake Southern society to ameliorate the condition of keep freed Blacks to keep them in the South. With the defeated South's loyalty assured, the country moved on to the larger business of national reconciliation, development of the South's resources, westward expansion, and America's prosperity and rise in the world.
Yet, even if deferred as to Blacks, America's foundational principles could not be ignored forever. As Blacks acquired education and skills, by the mid-20th century, they learned how to insist on the full measure of rights due them. Imperfect we are as a people and as a country, but we now more fully live according to our principles. And, in the odd, crosswise way of history, those principles were mostly laid down by Southern slaveholders wearing knee britches and powdered wigs.