Why was the American Civil War fought?

Answer 1

There were many reasons:

• The South appeared to be getting rich enough to form a separate nation, with the cotton revenues (over half of U.S. exports) diverted from Washington D.C. to Montgomery, Alabama.
• Issues were heating up between "slave" states and "non-slave" states, particularly between Kansas and Missouri.
• Issues of nullification that rose from the drafting of the Constitution began to move to the forefront, and debate raged between the rights of the states versus the rights of the federal government. this came to a head with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 that allowed new states to determine if they would be slave or free by popular sovereignty.
• The issues of slavery, and the belief that Lincoln was staunchly anti-slavery, were at the center of the seceding states' reasons for separating from the Union, and the issue of slavery only served to drive the State's Rights vs. Federal Rights debate.
• The issue of States' Rights. The South was afraid that Abraham Lincoln would emancipate slaves, and they believed that the US President should not be making decisions that affected the entire country and that States should have the right to make that decisions.

The Civil War, also known as The War Between the States, was fought to prevent eleven Southern states from leaving the Union. After 150 years, the question of the basis for the war is still debated. The reasons are so interrelated that they are likely inseparable.

1) The moral evil of Slavery

Over the previous 20 years, there was a huge buildup of anti-slavery sentiment in the North, and it eventually got so bad that legislators were carrying loaded pistols into the House and Senate. When Lincoln was elected, the Southern states proclaimed that the Confederacy was founded on the principle that 'The Negro is not equal to the White man'. Anyone who says the issue was states rights, or anything else, or covering up the true issue. If you look at a timeline of major incidents leading to the Civil War, slavery is clearly the primary cause. As a major economic strength of the South, the threat of its abolition was clearly of great concern.

The reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, with its date of enforcement, clearly suggests that Lincoln (who did not initially support abolition) was attempting to take the moral high ground at last, for two reasons. One was to influence the European allies of the South, who had abolished slavery within their borders. The second was to damage Southern unity by suggesting that some states might rejoin the Union to avoid emancipation. In any event, when the Senate passed the 13th Amendment in 1864, Lincoln's support was crucial to its passage in the House in January, 1865 following his re-election.

2) Economic Domination, not slavery, was the major issue

The Confederate army was made up mostly of simple non-slave owning farmers, Approximately 90-97% of the Confederacy. Why would these common men leave their families and risk their lives for a cause unrelated to them? All that these men wanted was to claim their lawful right to secede and gain the freedom to create a country of their own. With tremendous courage these men stood up for what they knew was right. Starving and outnumbered, they fought, bled and died for their beliefs. With steadfast determination and pride for their Southern names they did all this under the Confederate battle flag.

The truth about the Confederate army is that it has nothing to do with racism or hate. The civil war was not fought over slavery or racism. It was about freedom, government and taxation without representation. Just as the war for American Independence (1776) the war for Southern Independence (1861) was fought over the federal government constantly trying to raise taxes on the Southern people. This was done through high tariffs on imported goods, in order to protect the inefficient big businesses in the North. These big businesses could not compete with manufactured goods from England and France with whom the South traded cotton. The South did not have factories and had to import most finished goods. The industrial Revolution allowed England and France to produce and ship across the Atlantic products that were cheaper than the products coming from the Northern manufacturers.

When Abraham Lincoln was elected president, he and the U.S Congress immediately passed the Morrill Tariff (the highest import tax in U,S history), more than doubling the import tax rate from 20% to 47%. This tax served to bankrupt many southerners. This oppressive tax is what pushed Southern states to withdraw from the union. Since the Southerners had escaped the tax by withdrawing from the union, the only way the North could collect this oppressive tax was to invade the Confederate States and force them at gunpoint back into the Union. It was to collect this import tax to satisfy his Northern industrialist supporters that Abraham Lincoln invaded the South.

3) States Rights vs Federalism

The primary cause of the Civil War was states' rights. The South felt that it was being dominated by the North, and sought to protect their rights to self-government.