"Look at the Honest Words of the Secessionists"

"I’ve heard it from women and from men, from sober people and from people liquored up on anti-Washington talk. The North wouldn’t let us govern ourselves, they say, and Congress laid on tariffs that hurt the South. So we rebelled. Secession and the Civil War, in other words, were about small government, limited federal powers and states’ rights.
"But a look through the declaration of causes written by South Carolina and four of the 10 states that followed it out of the Union—which, taken together, paint a kind of self-portrait of the Confederacy—reveals a different story. From Georgia to Texas, each state said the reason it was getting out was that the awful Northern states were threatening to do away with slavery."

Edward Ball in The New York Times explains the origins of the Civil War.