Question

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Answer 1

I don't think they felt they needed to, so much as they felt they could, and get away with it. They certainly anticipated that as US expanded westward, more free states would enter the Union and tip the balance of power in the Federal government away from the South, thus putting in danger their "peculiar institution" (slavery) and more broadly their entire way of life. They saw the North, with its waves of immigrants and rapidly urbanizing, industrializing society as falling away from the Jeffersonian ideal of an agrarian republic full of citizen-legislators. So they didn't like the cultural future they saw there.

But until the 1850s they probably didn't think they could get away with secession. However, a sequence of weak Presidents, and the willingness of Northern legislators (like Stephen Douglas) to cut new deals that abandoned bright lines of the past, like the Missouri Compromise (abandoned by the Kansas-Nebraska Act), probably convinced them that this was the moment to seize -- the moment when it would be possible to "divorce" the Union, and go there own way as a separate nation. The rising price of their cotton in Europe probably also helped, by convincing them they could sustain themselves economically.

It's not entirely clear they were wrong to think so, either. It is entirely possible if a less resolute man than Lincoln had become President, or that President had not found a commander as resolute as Grant, that a negotiated end to the Civil War would have resulted in a separate southern nation.

From this point of view, the second question is badly worded. The compromises that Congress made in the 1840s and 1850s not only failed to keep the Union together, they helped cause its division.

The major issue that Congress cannot today resolve is how to pay for the welfare state it has erected. Congress has made promises to too many people, in amounts so much greater than can possibly be paid, that it has been forced for years to pretend and blow smoke about the parlous state of the nation's finances.

To give you a quick example, there are two ways to close the Federal budget deficit: DOUBLE absoluytely everybody's income taxes, or eliminate both the entire armed forces of the United States *and* all of Social Security. (If you want to tax only the "wealthy" you can also tax the top 1% of earners at 100%, ha ha). The gap between what the Federal government has promised American citizens, and what the financial resources of the country can actually provide, is immense. This is the fundamental issue of our day with which Congress has utterly unable to come to grip. No solution is offered, and indeed Congress does its best to pretend either the problem doesn't exist, or might easily be solved in some painless way if only the opposition would be reasonable. Neither is even remotely true.

Does this compare to the struggle over slavery in the 1850s? I would say not. That of the 1850s was rooted in part in morality, and in part in the sectional struggle for dominance in the newly rapidly growing power of the Federal government in the Industrial Age. Today's difficulties are largely around facing up to hard reality -- for example, that everyone can't support a comfortable life of 80 years by saving 5% of his earnings over a 38-year career (age 23 to 65). That math doesn't add up.