Recent controversies over Confederate symbols have raised the question: Why did the southern states secede from the Union in 1860-1861?
Those who claim that the South seceded to defend states' rights are wrong. The only rights that white southerners sought to preserve in seceding from the Union were their “rights” to hold slaves.
Beginning in the 1840s, the United States became embroiled in a fierce debate over two great issues — the right of slaveholders to reclaim fugitive slaves who had escaped into the North and the right to take their slaves into new federal territories in the West.
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