The Civil War was a war between America and itself. Of course, America won. This was a complex war that was started on many attempts to compromise on one thing, but it was to never work. The war was fought over a large thing, but one thing only. This was to be a war between the southern and northern states of what is now The United States of America.
The Civil War. What was it about? Was it all about slavery? Or was it about a various number of economic, social, and industrial factors? In this case, the simplest answer is the correct one. It was about slavery. When the war was fought, virtually everyone from Lincoln, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Ulysses Grant on the Union side to Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens on the Confederate side expressed that the war was caused by slavery.
Modern textbooks have a lot to do with this.
English: Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President ...
Map of the division of the states during the Civil...
English: Confederate General Robert E. Lee poses i...They don't want to hurt "Southern Pride" by outright saying that slavery was the main reason the South went to war. It's nothing new; in 1972, R. A. Lafferty's Okla Hannali declared "how ever it be falsified, there was only one issue there: slavery." Alexander Stephens himself said of the Confederacy, "Our new government's foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery - subordination to the superior race - is his natural and normal condition." Confederate soldiers rounded up free blacks wherever they found them and sent them back into the slave trade. Throughout the war, "the protection of slavery had been and still remained the central core of Confederate purpose" (Henry Burks)
The people of America set up many compromises to avoid this war. However, in the end they had...
Civil War
Slavery was certainly an important issue in the Civil War, but some would argue that it wasn't the main issue. The North fought in order to preserve the Union as many felt the South had no right to secede after a federal fort was attacked and seized, an act of open rebellion against the United States. The South fought because they felt that their right to self determination would be better served outside the Union. Southerners viewed the Union as something akin to a voluntary association which they had a right to leave if they wished, just as they had voluntarily joined. Lincoln acknowledged he would have kept slavery or abolished it, whichever would better preserve the Union. He abolished it in those states in open rebellion against the Union two years after the war began.
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