by Jerry Curtis

Created on: May 29, 2009   Last Updated: April 30, 2011

The principal causes of the American Civil war were (1) the controversy over the spread of slavery, (2) the argument over states’ rights, and (3) the election of Abraham Lincoln. The immediate cause, of course, was the Confederate artillery attack on Fort Sumter in April of 1861, but by that time, the Civil War was pretty much a “done deal.”

(1) The controversy over the spread of slavery.

By the mid-19th century, our country was expanding towards the vast prairie lands of Kansas and Nebraska and beyond. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 set the northern limits of legal slavery at just south of the new state of Missouri (which, was a slave state even so). 

The Missouri Compromise compromise was shattered by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of the 1850s that hinged on the concept of “Popular Sovereignty.” The idea was that new settlers could vote and decide whether to be a free or slave state. Southerners wanted to take their slaves with them into new territories. Northerners, for reasons of hatred of slavery or because the presence of slaves meant less work for free whites, wanted no part of “popular sovereignty.”

The violence in “Bleeding Kansas” over the slavery issue was a low-level rehearsal for the Civil War that would follow. Other slavery issues that stoked the passions on both sides were the Dred Scott decision and Brown’s attack at Harper’s Ferry.

(2) The argument over states’ rights and the legality of secession

The main unifying ingredient that caused the South to secede was the notion that individual states should call the shots over taxation, slavery, and unpopular federal tariffs. Calling those shots, in the view of southern politicians, also included the “right” to leave the union that they originally voluntarily joined.

On the other hand, Abraham Lincoln’s view was that no nation could have a part of its fabric the means to destroy its own existence. In fact, Lincoln viewed the secession of southern states as nothing less than a test of our democratically based system. In his Address, Lincoln viewed the Civil War and the hoped-for Union victory would be “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

(3) The election of Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln’s new Republican Party defeated the divided Democrats in the election of 1860.  States’ rights and pro-slavery southerners could not abide the election of a party whose platform involved opposition to the spread of slavery and included hated northern abolitionists. Despite Lincoln’s assurances that he had no designs on slavery where it legally existed, southern states, began seceding in December of 1860, with South Carolina leading the way.

And the war came

It was the rabid secessionists in South Carolina, who, with the blessing of the new Confederate president Jefferson Davis, opened fire on the federal Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay. While South Carolinians celebrated the federal surrender and evacuation of the fort, Jefferson Davis must have realized that his new Confederacy had been maneuvered into firing the first shots in rebellion to federal authority.  What began was a four-year bloodletting where one half-million of our country’s young generation perished in the saddest and most destructive war in United States history.

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