When confronted with the fact that slavery played such a large part in Southern motivations for secession, I think that we should ask our open-minded opposition friends to bear a few things in mind, primarily this:

Slavery was a pawn in a much larger game.

And that game was being played for control of the federal government. As an industry-based economy, the North desired a more active role for Washington in terms of protecting its commercial interests. This automatically set it at variance with the South, which was of course an agriculture-based economy. For Southern interests to succeed, free-trade had to be maintained, and this mandated opposition to any attempts to broaden the federal government's role with respect to commerce. These factors created a situation early on in this country whereby the Northern states became the advocates of expanded government, while the Southern states became the advocates of limited government. The various political parties then adjusted themselves accordingly with the old federalist-consolidationists finding a new home in Northern politics following their defeat in Jefferson's election to the Presidency.

With the Northern population on the rise, the population-based House of Representatives quickly became the advocate of Northern interests. The battlefield for those determined to control the government was then destined to be the Senate, which was state-based and equal between the two sections for some time. Control of the government could not be had without control of the Senate. And the only way to gain control of the Senate was to add more Northern states to the Union than Southern states. This battle for the Senate thus became a battle for the territories out of which new states would be created and added to the Union.

Unfortunately for the consolidationists, political lines overlapped somewhat more in the beginning, so a way had to be found to isolate the matter geographically. This naturally led to the use of slavery as a means of separating the politics of the two sections due to the fact that slavery already geographically divided North and South. Consider how the Missouri Compromise was resolved: one 'free' state was admitted to the Union, and one 'slave' state was admitted, thus balancing power in the Senate once again. This balance of power, not a regard for slavery itself, was the heart of the matter.

Thomas Jefferson commented that the Missouri question had awakened him 'like a firebell in the night,' and that he believed it was 'at once the knell of the Union.' Writing to William Short on August 22, 1820, Jefferson commented: 'This is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.' Writing to Albert Gallatin in the same year, Jefferson also commented that he perceived the Missouri solution had negated the old political separations and 'devised a new one, of slave-holding, and non-slave-holding states, which, while it had semblance of being Moral, was at the same time Geographical, and calculated to give them ascend