...repeat what everyone said, but I do have to agree that they had the right to secede. And to tell you the truth, if I were a leader in the South at the time, I would have pushed for our independence, as well.

The North couldn't afford to let the South go. With all of the industrialization going on up North, they were entirely too dependent on Southern agriculture, but the South was losing out on the deal. The north bought raw materials from the south cheap as hell, then turned around and sold their products for a madd profit. The North was booming, the South was still broke, and 140 years later, you can still see the lasting effects of this dynamic.

Honestly, I think the whole idea of seceding was a bluff on the part of the South because they figured that they held all of the chips. The North wasn't going for it, so the South had to follow through.

The moral argument is a bunch of BS. Northerns were still making money off of the back of that slave labor in the South. But without looking like greedy hypocits, they had to add that institution to the mix so that they did have some sort of grounds for war. That's where that sense of northern "Morality" came from.