A couple of decades ago, a graduate student at U.Va. wrote a Master's essay
on the secession crisis in Georgia.  What he found was that during the
popular debate on the question, the advocates stressed the
republicanism/self-government question; when the elections had already been
held and the matter lay in the hands of the members of the slaveholding
elite elected to the secession convention (or was it the legislature?  I
don't recall), however, the proponents of secession focused on Lincoln's
election as a threat to slavery.  So, what can one conclude from that?

I do not myself understand why there is this felt imperative to insist that
slavery was the only cause of secession, on one hand, or that it was
virtually not a factor, on the other.  People seldom make such decisions on
the basis of lone motives, and slavery seems certainly to have been one of
the factors involved in this process.  We needn't agree with either side in
this argument, then.

Along that line, I would note that Woody Holton's _Forced Founders_ proved
several years ago that fears concerning slavery was one of the factors
motivating Virginia Patriots to separate from Great Britain in the 1770s.
It's odd that while the Confederates are always castigated on this score
(rightly, in my opinion), the Patriots of 1776 get a pass.  This, it seems
to me, likely says something about the motivations of the people involved in
this historiographic debate -- but I'm not sure exactly what.

Constantine Gutzman

Prof. K.R. Constantine Gutzman
Department of History
Western Connecticut State University

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