Why did the south secede?
During the 1860’s, the tension between the slave owning southern states and the free-soil northern states came to a head mainly over the issue of whether newly admitted states to the union would be required by the US government to be non-slave states, or whether they would be able to make their own decision to be a slave state or free state. This was, by far, the biggest reason used for arguing for Southern secession but there were other issues that intensified the conflict such as party politics, religious arguments over the morality of slavery, and the southern fear of losing their agrarian society to industrialization, economic issues also played a small part in the conflict. The richest people in southern society were large plantation owners and they had everything to lose if slavery was either outlawed or not allowed to expand any further and as such they used any tactic they could to put fear in the hearts of other southerners, most of whom did not own slaves. These poor and uned
