Slavery/or States Rights?

Is there truly a difference in what the Civil War was being fought over when asking the question posed in the header? If one would argue that the Civil War was fought over states' rights the question can be: States' rights to do what? Name me any other "States Rights" issue that has led to a war? Have "States Rights" issues disappeared since then? What about when the federal government mandated wearing seat belts or raising the drinking age or raising the tobacco consumption age etc...? Have we had any more real threats of civil war?

Is this a real question of states' rights? Or did some people just want to continue to keep people enslaved?

 

Over the next decade after the Nullification Crisis of 1832,  another central dispute over states' rights moved to the forefront. The issue of slavery polarized the union, with the Jeffersonian principles often being used by both sides, anti-slavery Northerners, and Southern slaveholders and secessionists, in debates that ultimately led to the American Civil War. Supporters of slavery often argued that one of the rights of the states was the protection of slave property wherever it went, a position endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857 Dred Scott decision.  In contrast, opponents of slavery argued that the non-slave-states' rights were violated both by that decision and by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Here emerged the question and controversy on which or whose state right was it all about.

Based on a broad interpretation of the 10th Amendment, States' Rights was the idea that states had the right to control all issues in their state not specifically given to the federal government by the specific words of the Constitution. It was used by mostly Southern states to argue that they had the right to nullify or ignore federal laws they did not agree with.

Southern states' argument in the 1850s was that federal law to ban slavery discriminated against states that allowed slavery, making them second-class states. In 1857, the Supreme Court sided with these states' rights supporters, declaring in Dred Scott decision that Congress had no authority to regulate slavery in the territories. However, the Southern states sometimes argued against states rights. For example, Texas challenged some northern states having the right to protect fugitive slaves.

While the southern states fought to retain their slave-owning rights and powers in the government, there was an increasing cognitive dissonance in the minds of Northerners and some Southern non-slaveowners between the ideals that the United States was founded upon and identified itself as standing for, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights, and the reality that the slave-power represented, as what they describe as an anti-democratic, counter-republican, oligarchic, despotic, authoritarian, if not totalitarian, movement for ownership of human beings as the personal chattels of the slaver. As this cognitive dissonance increased, the people of the Northern states, and the Northern states themselves, became increasingly inclined to resist the encroachments of the Slave Power upon their states' rights and encroachments of the Slave Power by and upon the federal government of the United States. The Slave Power, having failed to maintain its dominance of the federal government through democratic means, sought other means of maintaining its dominance of the federal government, through military aggression, by right of force and coercion, and thus, the Civil War occurred.