I think I have never found a better collection of reasons why Southerners so willingly went to war. When ever someone brings up the "Declarations of Causes" for secession... it should always be followed with the "causes" for the war. Here I post...

The Southern Presbyterian Review. 1862.

By Rev. Thomas Smyth, D. D., Charleston, S. C.

...All forms of religion, Jewish and Christian, and all forms
of Christianity, Romish and Protestant, High Church and
Low, are now found ranged side by side, under common
leaders and common chaplains, and uniting in acts of com
mon worship, praise and prayer.

What a spectacle to God, to angels, and to the world !
What lamentation in heaven ! What a jubilee in hell !
"What a triumph to despotism and infidelity ! See how
these Christians hate one another, and how Republicans, by
a sectional majority, take the Government out of the hands
of a million majority, and put it into the hands of a military despotism;
which sets aside the Supreme Court;
tramples on the Constitution ; ignores, and even opposes
Congress ; against all constitutional authority sets up
Scott as a military dictator; calls for seventy-five thou
sand and accepts two hundred and fifty thousand troops ;
proclaims war; creates a self-chosen military Board to
supercede State authorities; declares martial law; sets at
defiance the fundamental right of habeas corpus and
the decrees of Courts, even of the Supreme Court; abolishes
trial by jury; not only raises armies, but orders their
number and term of service, and compels them to take a
test oath of allegiance ; builds, purchases and hires ships
of war; mans, equips, and gives them secret and peremptory
orders; blockades ports of States still declared to be
in the Union ; divides such States into military districts ;
takes military possession of Maryland, against the declarations
of her authorities ; shoots down her citizens, forcibly
seizes her arms, dwellings and property ; imprisons her
citizens without charge or trial ; establishes a hostile camp
commanding Baltimore, and opens the batteries of Fort
McHenry on the city; takes military possession of St.
Louis, and shoots down men, women and children in her
streets ; foments and aids civil war in Virginia, Kentucky,
Texas, and Missouri ; invades Virginia, and takes military
possession of Hampton and Alexandria, where it brutally
murders a peaceable citizen defending his own house, family
and property against an infamous soldiery who were
permitted to rob and pillage an unarmed and unresisting
population, and to outrage helpless women ; has destroyed
public property in ships, buildings and forts, to an amount
of some twenty millions of dollars,. and involved the country,
even in the period of a few months, in a loss of not
less than one thousand millions of dollars ; which has justified
the cowardly assassination of a resident citizen of Washington,
at the door of his own house, to which he had been summoned for
the cold-blooded purpose of murder ; hung without trial, a merchant
of Hampton, Virginia, for shooting an officer who took forcible
possession of his store and goods, and struck him in the face
with his drawn sword ; stripped a gentleman of the same town stark naked,
and in that condition marched him as a prisoner to Fortress
Monroe ; destroyed crops and houses, and other property,
in a single county, and in a single week, to the extent of
five hundred thousand dollars; commended the retention
of all fugitive slaves ; attempted through a slave cook to
poison the food of the soldiery ; plots the assassination of
President Davis; violated all the confidential sanctities of
the telegraph and the post-office ; established a reign of
terror, by a system of espionage and threats, over men and
women, over the press and free speech ; and against all
law, human and divine, is now proceeding, unless God pre
vent, to carry devastation throughout the South, until it is
brought into prostrate subjection ; who privateers, while
proclaiming it to be piracy and worthy of death ; and who
employs mercenary foreign hirelings to invade, ravage,
and destroy unarmed and unsuspecting towns of a neutral
State, shooting its inhabitants, and barbarously trampling
and kicking to death an infirm old man, eighty years
of age.

ALL THIS, and MORE, has been done within the space of a
few weeks. All this has been perpetrated, after the refusal
of power, even by an almost exclusively Republican Congress,
and without waiting for another, which is called
only to ratify these acts, and prostrate themselves and the
Constitution before the usurping despot, and while the
Constitution, which Lincoln swore to " preserve, protect,
and defend," neither authorizes him nor Congress to make
war against a State, much less against eleven, and, we may
say, fourteen States, such power having been expressly with
held by its framers, after full deliberation. Mr. Lincoln is,
therefore, not only a usurper and a military despot, but a
perjured traitor, as is now declared by the recent judgment
of Chief Justice Taney, who administered to him
the above solemn oath, in the presence of multitudes, and
before the righteous tribunal of Heaven's avenging justice.
Military officers are permitted in Virginia to command the
silence of the press; prisoners are detained at Washington
"who surrendered under protest against violated faith, and
refused a hearing, although taken by a subordinate officer
while preparing to evacuate Alexandria within the time
agreed upon, under a flag of truce sent from the Pawnee,
the commanding officer declaring that he knew of no
agreement. This unscrupulous and audacious tyrant sanctions
acts of military dictatorship which transcend the
power of any monarch upon earth, and overwhelm in oblivious
ruin Magna Charta, the bill of rights, habeas corpus,
trial by jury, and every right for which Englishmen and
our fathers have contended, unto blood, for ages past.
Might now makes right, and unchained devils, with all the
shameless passions of brutish beasts, are let loose to ravish
and ravage, even neutral States. Not only at Alexandria,
but at Hampton, are these rascalities perpetrated, and near
Norfolk, a father was compelled to witness the brutal out
rage of his own daughter, a young lady of sixteen years
of age.

Such, alas ! is the opprobrious spectacle now exciting
the contumely and ridicule of patriots, philanthropists
and Christians throughout the world. The war upon the
South now is, not to subject them to the Government and
Union of the United States, as they existed, but to a new
Government—without law or constitution—fanatical,
remorseless and tyrannical....