Sheridan - points well put, but...
The North believed the tariffs were essential, and that the South had agreed to those tariffs. The South believed it had the right to block internal improvements which the North wanted, and thought the tariffs should be temporary. Neither side made much effort to understand the needs of the other.
And the West - the growing power that both North and South courted - was absolutely dependent on the Mississippi River and New Orleans to get its crops to market. Railroad rates were much more expensive and railroads were not as plentiful as in later years. The West needed products from the North to farm and needed access through the South to get those products out. The West was dependent on both regions, hence it never really went solidly into either camp.
In my analysis, the South left the Union because of three things:
1) Fear of what the North could do, rather than proof of what the new administration would do, and a failure to realize the Northern and Western states were not a monolithic bloc like the South
2) Failure to abide by long-understood and accepted conditions on the limitation of slavery to the Deep South and failure to understand that people who didn't favor abolition were appalled at the Dred Scott decision and the pursuit of slaves into free states
3) Fire-eaters who believed they would control a Southern nation (they were wrong - they were almost uniformly rejected for public office in the Confederacy)
The South's refusal to accept the results of the Presidential election and determination to secede unless they had virtual veto power in the government turned the rest of the nation against them. Much like we react to the child who says 'do it my way or I'll take my toys and go home.'
The Grinch -
it is indeed a fact that other sections of the US had threatened secession on more than one occasion, and a fact that both sides felt betrayed in the fight over tariffs (among other issues).
Let's look at the logic from both sides.
A slave-owning Southerner believes his property is not secure unless he can take it to other states. His property is not secure if the federal government can seize it, whether or not he is paid something when the property is seized. Hence, the South must have enough votes in Congress to block any such seizure.
A Northerner is repelled at slave-hunters crossing into his state and grabbing blacks who are said to be slaves. He hates the idea of the extension of slavery into other states, and believes the Founding Fathers agreed that slavery would not be extended. And if his state prohibits slavery and frees any slave who enters, he resents the federal government saying that's not so. After all, if a slave-owner moves in with his slaves, then the Northerner's state becomes a slave state - from his point of view.
As you said, it is a clash of cultures and a study in mutual incomprehension.
The most fascinating element for me has always been the large number of non-slave-owning Southerners who volunteered to fight for the Confederacy. But I believe there would have been no secession without the money, political power and self-interest of the slave-owners.
Sadly, the Mexican War of the previous decade had convinced both sides that it would be a small, short, easy war with low casualties. Had they known what was coming, I think some compromise would have been reached. But both sides believed in the short, victorious war and both paid. The South bet everything on a 'sure bet' and lost everything.
I just get so tired of people here in the South arguing that slavery had little or nothing to do with secession (that statement's not directed at anyone here on the board, by the way). It was a direct cause and it underlay every other cause.
Had the South never adopted slavery, it would never have enjoyed the explosive development and wealth that the plantation system brought. What it would have been like, I do not know, but a South without slavery would have been very different. Perhaps more like Ohio, Illinois and Indiana, all of which share borders with Southern states.
I believe that without slavery - and the breakup of the Union - polarizing the debate, compromises would have continued to be worked out with much heat but no war. Or in an extreme case an amicable separation, with the Union fracturing into two, three, or more polities.
The second-most fascinating is the way the 'fireeaters' on both sides kept fanning the sparks until war broke out. There hasn't been such a disastrous failure of diplomacy since WWI.
If you want to get into what-ifs, here are two:
1) the Trent Incident actually does blow up into war. Can the Union survive? My opinion: probably, though maintaining the blockade is out of the question, and the Confederacy would survive. Britain would have had a difficult time putting as many troops into Canada as the Union could, and the British navy was in for a shock in coastal waters when it encountered Union ironclads. Remember that for much of the war the Royal Navy possessed only two, and they were inferior in armor and firepower to American monitors.
2) the face of the post-war Confederacy had it survived. Does it continue as an agrarian state or pursue the industrialization forced on it by the war? Do the strong state governors succeed in turning it into a banana republic, or could an ambitious president make it over into a dictatorship? And what would happen to American prosperity and economic growth with standing armies and long frontiers?
EU2Lover - Yes, fear that the new Republican administration would move to curb slavery drove the original Deep South states to secede. Lincoln's call for volunteers swung enough votes to then push Virginia and the rest of the Southern states out. Kentucky initially tried to stay neutral but was too centrally located to remain so.
I'm sure your ancestor had good reasons for fighting for his home and family, and you should be proud of his strength of conviction. But if you trace back to root causes, the issue that drove South Carolina to secede was fear that the Lincoln administration would curb or try to abolish slavery. Once the avalanche began, a lot of other motivations got mixed in.
Lincoln said repeatedly that he would free some, all or none of the slaves if that would keep the Union together. The South did not believe him. He finally emancipated slaves in the states that were in rebellion - not everywhere - to deny the South a pool of cheap labor. His personal preference was a system of purchase and emancipation with the freed slaves being shipped back to Africa. That idea had the distinction of being hated by all sides.
