What was the reason for this Civil War?

Answer 1

This simple question has generated a great deal of controversy almost since the war began. Not long ago I read a published letter in which the writer insisted that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, and on a technicality she was correct. Abraham Lincoln's election as president in 1860 was widely celebrated in some parts of what would become the Confederate States of America because they now had the excuse they needed to secede or resign from the Union. The southern slaveholding interests had been fearful that their "peculiar institution" was going to be outlawed or at least heavily restricted ever since the Constitutionally-organized United States of America began in 1789, and while there were an equal number of slave and free states slavery remained pretty much untouched by the Federal government.

By 1850, however, the admission of California as a free state upset the balance in the US Senate 16-15; the US House of Representatives favored the free states because the northern states had a larger total population than the plantation-based south. With California's admission, no more slave states were admitted, although the southern states continued to hope that southwestern territories, gained through the Mexican War, could be admitted in the future as slave states. Abraham Lincoln was considered a "moderate" anti-slavery candidate - he didn't call for the abolition of slavery in the existing states, as other political leaders did, because he believed the US Constitution protected it. He did, however, favor non-extension, which meant slavery should be prohibited in any territory that sought admission as a new state. This was enough to move seven southern states to secede, and when Lincoln sent military supplies to Fort Sumter in South Carolina, state forces there attacked the fort. He then called for an army to put down the rebellion.

At the start of the Civil War, President Lincoln, not wanting to violate the Constitution's protection of slavery, officially prosecuted the war strictly to preserve and protect the Union. In response, the Confederacy claimed the war was to protect them from Federal aggression. Yet one fact cannot be denied; as Lincoln himself put it, slavery was the "sine quo non" of the rebellion. In other words, if slavery had never existed in the United States, there would have been no war. From the time of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia (1787), America's political leaders had been able to find a solution to every major problem through compromise - each side would give up something in order to get something else. But slavery could not be addressed through compromise, and so war was the only way to settle the question of its continued existence.