democratic unity of the principles that it had always espoused. It is thus a little puzzling that late 20th century explanations of the Civil War should focus so narrowly on slavery, for it is hard to believe that slavery alone would have been a sufficient reason to "pull down the temple" of the United States, to borrow Andrew Calhoun's 1860 description of Secession.
In some ways, this seeming desire to explain the Civil War entirely in terms of slavery versus abolition resides in Abraham Lincoln himself, with his insistence that the "peculiar and powerful interest" of slavery in the South "was somehow the cause of the war". These words of Lincoln's have the advantage of presenting the issue in a simple and straightforward way - sort of an early version of a sound bite by a man who surely would have excelled at them. But one of the many problems with this argument is that it assumes something of a Southern conspiracy in seceding, and this is not an accurate description of events. The South did not secede in a uniform action over the issue of slavery. Rather, states seceded individually and for their individual reasons.
The justifications put forward by the Southern secessionists were mostly based in the very differing culture of the Southern part of the country, although they were rarely cloaked in such terms. The Civil War was in many ways a war about culture, about different ways of living and about different futures that could be dreamed and imagined. But the rhetoric of Secession often used political and legal language to justify something that was in fact far more primal. This paper examines the case put forward by the secessionists, looking at both the official political justifications for Secession and the cultural forces that underpinned them before moving on to a discussion of the ways that both Southerners in general and secessionists in particular were divided amongst themselves.
Before examining in greater detail ...