Thanks to slavery, in the South capital and labor were combined in nearly four million sweating field hands picking cotton and planting rice. - William C. Davis

Legalistic Southerners tried to view the Constitution as a contract. Unfortunately, that viewpoint breaks down when viewed as a lawyer views a contract. There are very few ways to legally break a contract unilaterally.

The secession and the Confederacy's existence were predicated on slavery, on preserving and defending it against containment, as virtually all of its founders from Robert Barnwell Rhett to Jefferson Davis unashamedly declared in 1861.

Even in 1832 there were those in the South who confessed that the tariff was only a battlefield, not the war. If they did not fight their ground and win on the tariff, soon enough they would be fighting for something even closer to their hearths, slavery itself.