The Southern Cause: What Led To Secession
'Libertarians are and must be sympathetic to secession, for secession is nothing other than an exit right...'
It is correct, analytically and logically, to distinguish secession from war. Many states secede peacefully, and it does not logically follow that secession must occasion war. The Southern states of America seceded peacefully, and Lincoln’s subsequent war which followed four months after secession was entirely unnecessary.
Hence, Murray Rothbard wrote in his memo to the Volker Fund in 1961 that,
“The road to Civil War must be divided into two parts:
the causes of the controversy over slavery leading to secession, and
the immediate causes of the war itself.
“The reason for such split is that secession need not have led to Civil War, despite the assumption to the contrary by most historians.“
Nevertheless, in understanding the Southern Cause it would be historically misleading to isolate secession entirely from the war, or to treat the two events as hermetically sealed off from each other. It is important to split them for the purpose Rothbard stated, namely, to debunk the assumption that secession must involve war, because many people wrongly view calls for secession as calls for war. But it does not follow that in understanding American history, the two events must be treated, for all purposes, as if they were not in any way historically, causally, or morally connected.
The Southern Cause found its expression in both secession and war, and it would be quite wrong to pretend that…