If it could have been avoided, it would have been on the part of the north. The yankee states did not want to compromise and therefore provoked the south into leaving the union. But the yanks always had their own interests at heart, and for so long as that should have remained a key factor, secession would have been nothing less than inevitable.

Do not take this to heart. This is just my own personal opinion.

-Argiope

Another way to think about it is that the South told the North, “We want a secession!” . . . but instead, picture the South telling the North, “I want a divorce!” They both basically mean the same thing.

The South was leaving, it wanted out of the marriage (union), and it was going its own way . . . which the Southern states did by starting a new nation, The Confederate States of America.

Could secession have been avoided? I don’t think so, because there was a very strong disagreement between the North and the South, and no easy way to compromise.

The North believed that slavery was wrong, and wanted to outlaw it in the U.S. (Slavery happened to be concentrated in the South, due to the need for labor in large farms there.)

The South believed that each state should make its own laws, and therefore there should be no federal laws about slavery. (By “federal,” I mean the national government in Washington, D.C.–the President, Congress, etc.)

The South’s argument may sound unfamiliar, but it’s actually very American. The Bill or Rights, the first ten Amendments to the Constitution, are basically a list of things the federal government is NOT allowed to do. The Founding Fathers were opposed to a strong central government.

So the argument was between freedom for slaves (a moral principle) and states’ rights (an American principle of democracy). This is why it would’ve been hard to find a compromise.

In the end, no compromise was reached, and the two sides went to war. The North won, so slavery was outlawed . . . also, America has a very powerful federal govenment today as well.

Though the term is often associated with full civil war, there are different degrees of secession, some as minor as a particular neighborhood seeking to become a separate municipality from a larger city while still maintaining greater national ties.

not to be confused with succession, the act of following in order or sequence