- In 1861, a group of Southern states seceded from the American Union and declared themselves independent as the Confederate States of America. From there events took on a life of their own and the situation devolved into a full-blown war. The war was the result, like so many civil wars, of the failure of internal politics. In this case, the great failure was to resolve tensions over the future of Slavery in America; the ‘Slave States’ feared that the central government in Washington D.C. would attempt to regulate or ban the slave trade and the practice of slavery, an unjustified fear but one understandable in the context of the liberalization of the Northern Free States, where Anti-Slavery groups modeled after their British counterparts had begun to flourish.