Well the first shot was fired by the south after the secession.
The Civil War was not a reaction to secession, it was a reaction to rebellion. Your point is that if that rebellion was the result of lincoln’s beard then it would still have been the rebellion that caused the civil war. Well what caused the rebellion? They weren’t rebelling because of Lincoln’s beard and if the rebellion was in fact because of Lincoln’s beard then Lincoln’s beard would have been the cause of the civil war.
I think youa re confusing binding areements with involuntary agreements.
But again, absent slavery there is no reason to think there would be “a North” and “a South”. (Now, if the “South” had merely replaced de jure slavery with some sort of racially-based serfdom, the underlying conflict might still remain.) In particular, what Southerners persist in calling “the North” was hardly a single coherent region. The thing that united Iowa and Massachusetts was (opposition to) slavery.
This is not to say that there could not have ever been a non-slavery-based civil war in the United States if, say, slavery had been phased out by gradual emancipation early in the Republic. It might even likely have been a regionally-based war, with opposing groups of states (as opposed to a civil war in which the Reds and the Blues fight each other house-to-house in cities in all parts of the country). In 1776, someone predicting whether or not the new nation would collapse into civil war (assuming that it was able to win its independence) might have guessed at an East-West conflict, with the interests of the older, more settled areas clashing with those of the frontier regions.
When you asked whether he was kidding, the answer is “yeah he was kidding” You missed it but he was being sarcastic.
Pride. Most people don’t want to admit that their ancestors fought and died to perpetuate slavery. It sounds a lot better to say that your grandpappy died in the civil war to protect freedom (the freedom to won slaves).
I imagine that the Japanese try to spin their colonialist period as well. Almost noone wants to admit that their ancestors were evil.
The legacy of the war might have been supremacy of the federal government but the reason for the war was still slavery. It is THE “but for” cause of the civil war.
OK, so they are both evil. I don’t think anyone here is saying that slavery isn’t evil. They aren’t really trying to defend slavery, they are trying to defend the honor of people who fought and died to protect something that was evil by pretending that they actually fought and died to protect “states rights”
Who’s got the time?
I grew up with all sorts of misperceptions of history and it took a change in environment (living in other countries for a few years and hanging out with diplomats) to get an inkilng of an idea that perhaps my views on some subjects might be incorrect.
Yes, but the whole reason the South refused to vote for Republicans (and in many cases, not even put them on the ballot) was because the party’s central platform included opposition to slavery.
The South wasn’t even going to consider the possibility of letting a Republican in the White House - and the second it became clear it could happen whether they liked it or not, slavery as an institution was in jeopardy.
Well shoot, ANYTHI(NG is possible. The gap between "could’ and “would” on the certainty spectrum is immense. What other factor do you think WOULD have compelled the South to form and army and fire on Fort Sumter? The Civil War was by no means inevitable in the absence of slavery, I can’t think of a single factor that is so divides the country by state and region that it would cause secession and war.
Shoot even Obama won Virginia, North Carolina, Florida and New Mexico.
When you say this you are implying that the South felt that they had a commonality of interests that were contrary to the interests of the rest of the nation. I think this commonality of interests would not survive the absence of slavery. Sure the Southern states were largely agrarian but so were many of the new states that didn’t adopt slavery and didn’t secede from the union.
How many non-slave states joined the confederacy in rebellion against the Federal Government’s violation of states’ rights? I mean, surely, if it was about states’ rights and not about slavery then there must have been some non-slave states in the Confederacy right?
To expand on this, I’ve long felt that slavery severely distorted the South economically, politically, and psychologically, driving it almost inevitably into the form it did. And, the side effect of this was that as industrialization became more important over time the North would inevitably come to dominate the South because the South couldn’t industrialize because it was so distorted by slavery.
Two of the problems specific to American slavery from the beginning was that it went against our own supposed principles of freedom and equality, and that over time it became clearer and clearer by example that non-slaver civilization was not only possible but could prosper. This meant that perpetuating slavery required a level of self delusion not necessary in civilizations (ancient Rome or Greece, say) who had no moral problems with it and that saw slavery as a universal feature of civilization. And that IMHO put major limitations on what could be done with slaves; they couldn’t educate them not just out of fear of rebellion but because successfully educating them would amount to an admission that they weren’t subhuman. Not a problem for the Romans - but a definite problem for people who justified slavery on the grounds that the slaves were lesser beings. And their attempt to defend slavery as necessary drove them ever further into self delusion as it became more and more empirically obvious that it wasn’t.
So, they were severely limited to what they could do with their slaves without educating them. This pretty much left them with nothing but agriculture as a possible economic base. That in turn meant that they would inevitably be overshadowed by the North as it industrialized. A more rational society might have given up slavery and industrialized at that point - but doing so would require admitting that they were wrong, and in this situation admitting they were wrong would have amounted to admitting that they were evil and had been evil for generations. They were psychologically committed to slavery being just, viable and necessary; because only slavery being just, viable and necessary would justify what they’d been doing for generations. As time went by and the moral and practical wrongness of slavery become more and more obvious they became more and more irrational because the levels of self delusion necessary to justify their position kept increasing.
And it’s been pointed out before that once the slave based plantation system was set up, a huge chunk of their wealth was concentrated in the form of slaves; this also economically trapped them. But it’s a trap that their dedication to slavery and their conviction that slaves were subhuman pretty much required that they walk into.
So, to sum up my view, they were economically and psychologically so committed to slavery that it would have been nearly impossible for them to willingly give it up; and in turn that meant that they were doomed as a society as soon as they let themselves become so locked in to slavery. And so yes, the Civil War was about slavery; because at that point pretty much everything involving the South was about slavery. But, it wasn’t nearly as much about slavery for the North, because the North wasn’t such a single-issue, slavery-distorted society.
That is a good overview, Der Trihs. I would quibble that the economic trap was stronger than the moral one (since I think people’s morality is usually flexible enough to accommodate their own economic benefit), but the combination of the two made it next impossible for Southerners to imagine any other version of their society.
That’s just your take, with which I strongly disagree. I think the South has always been culturally distinct from the North, dating back to the divide between Jamestown and Plymouth. The cultural divide can still be seen today, in ways which have nothing to do with slavery. See this thread for one example.
That is mostly true, although the tariff was a genuine issue. (Republicans favored increasing tariffs as part of their 1860 platform.) But assume the slavery issue hadn’t existed, and Lincoln hadn’t been elected. The demographics of the situation would have been the same. The North had sufficient electoral power to control the reins of government, and therefore control the outcome of any political debate that divided North and South. The tariff was one such issue. Would it have eventually become a big enough issue to spark a war. Who knows?
You might be right, particularly given that southern Illinois and southern Indiana were largely populated by migrants from the South (including Lincoln’s own parents), and therefore shared a cultural connection with the South. The interests of those rural regions would have been the same as those of the South with respect to the tariff issue.
Another way of saying that might be that without the slavery issue, the Northern states might never have found enough unity of purpose to maintain support of the tariff. 
I don’t know, though. Money talks in politics, then as now, so I can imagine northeastern industrialists maintaining their sway in Congress on the tariff issue. They managed to get it into the Republican platform somehow.
Again, don’t misunderstand me. I am not arguing that slavery didn’t spark the Civil War. It quite obviously did. I am just carrying through the thought experiment suggested earlier - whether the North and South might have split on other grounds had slavery not existed as an issue. Perhaps not, but I think you can’t rule it out.
The Whigs favored high tariffs, but that didn’t stop the South from giving them popular and electoral votes, nor did it prompt them to omit Whig candidates from the ballot altogether (as Fremont and Lincoln had been), nor did the election of a Whig candidate result in Southern secession.
What was the main issue causing the geopolitical divide between the two regions?
The fact that the regions are culturally and politically different doesn’t change the fact that only one difference was worth seceding over.
Highly doubtful, as the Southern responses to the issues of tariffs vs. abolition were vastly different.
Five elections took place with Whig candidates on all the Southern ballots.
Two elections put a Whig in the white house with no state seceding as a result.
Zero elections took place with a Republican candidate on the ballot in all the Southern states.
Zero elections put a Republican in the white house with no state seceding as a result.
Slavery was obviously the main issue. Did I say anything to the contrary? 
Up to that point, true. (Though some of the Northern states seemed to think the War of 1812 might be worth seceding over.)
A generation earlier, the Indian removal issue had also divided North and South.
The tariff issue divided North and South.
Who knows what other issues might have arisen?
Were they? Have you forgotten the “Tariff of Abominations” (1828) and the nullification crisis it provoked? Seems to me Southern demagogues could get pretty hot-headed over taxes. If you get another ambitious politician like Calhoun, who might see himself as the potential president of a Southern republic, I think you’d be surprised what grounds he might find to gin up regional resentments.
I just don’t think you can rule out the possibility that the South might have one day seceded even in the absence of the slavery issue.
In my case at least it’s not about my ancestors. They arrived in America not long before the war, and were never involved in it, moving directly into lives of complete poverty working as virtual slaves themselves in coal mines (if you think sharecropping was a villainous farce, check the history of American coal mining some time). I do think it’s important to note, that the Civil war would have been impossible without all of those infantry that made it the deadliest war in U.S. history. While the southern officer corps was heavily from the southern aristocricy with a deep vested financial and through rationalization moral support for slavery, the majority of the southern soldiers who were fighting, did not own slaves, and while their culture told them they were entitled to do so, had no hope of ever getting enough money together to buy one. For those soldiers, States rights was by far the most persuasive argument. The north was trying to tell the south what to do, and they believed this wouldn’t stop at slavery. You may argue about it being ‘most’ of the sub-group of infantry that had this attitude, however I don’t see how anyone can exclude it as a factor entirely.
I think that this is getting the consequences confused with the causes, again. Just as the North did not go to War to abolish slavery, I doubt that many Southern infantry enlisted to promote “states rights.”
As already noted, the rhetoric of the South was hugely involved with “preserving” slavery. Among other things, slavery was a principal factor in establishing class in the South. The phrase “poor white trash” was coined to indicate people who were so much an underclass that they weree only saved from being the bottom rung by being white. Abolition of slavery would have destroyed that class structure, endangering the personal perceptions of people all along the class hierarchies.
Poor Southerners did not enlist to preserve slavery, per se, but it was slavery–much more than state rights–that set the foundation stone upon which their place in society was recognized.
This is not a claim that states rights played no part in the thinking of any particular Southerner, but it was not much of an actual point of instigation for secession. As has already been pointed out several times, Southerners were absolutely indignant that Northern states felt they had any “rights” to avoid prosecuting the various Fugitive Slave Laws. The South employed a “states rights” argument only in the area of slavery, making it a secondary issue at best.