Most wars are probably not caused by just one thing. Hence it’s easy for the revisionists to say “the civil war was not about slavery”.
Because it was about slavery AND tariffs AND economic resentment AND regional differences that had been present since the beginning AND views about whether a state or states could actually secede AND ....
Not EVERYTHING we were taught in school was wrong. Slavery was the principal driver that led to CW1 - those who would have it otherwise are using the fallacy that would say that since it was not the ONLY factor it was not A factor which is simply not true.
Slavery was the bone over which the two sides fought, but the real cause was a House divided, as Lincoln pointed out. Each side had too many firebrands who thought that the country had to be either slave or free. It was a clash of absolutes. There were moderates in both North and South, the Southern loyalists in Eastern Tennessee, the “Copperheads,” of NYC. But with Lincoln determined to hold the two disparate parts together by armed force, and without a decisive victory by either side, the passions boiled over.
Right. Fleming seizes upon the Haitian rebellion as the root of the issue. The British chose right solution, which was to defuse the issue by ending slavery in the Islands, but with compensation. Virginia and the other border areas did not because the Cotton Revolution made slavery profitable once more. But always in the back of their minds, especially after Nat Turner, the South knew it was riding a tiger and that the only way that race war could be avoided was constant expansion. This included expansion west and north of Missouri. The problem was that this brought them into a collision with the band of New England Settlement that extended all the way into Iowa.
“...Slavery was the principal driver that led to CW1
those who would have it otherwise are using the fallacy...”
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The issue at the time was not about the “rightness or the wrongness” of slavery.
The rightness or wrongness of the use of slave labor
was not a federal issue and the use of slave labor
was not prohibited by the constitution.
The prohibitions and restrictions of the use of slave labor
in the new states and territories being added in the west
were viewed as extra-constitutional,
so the southern states viewed “the contract” as having already been broken.
Neither slavery nor secession were prohibited by the constitution.
But, underlying all that is a basic disconnect between these two groups. It was this group of Northern, Republican, Industrial, elitists versus the Southern, Democrat, Agrarian, populists. That was the beginning of the shift from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy.
The populists lost and the geography shifted/expanded and conflicts came back with the rise of the great prairie populist democrat Williams Jennings Brian who not only exemplified his economic populism but also later his cultural populism when he prosecuted the Scopes monkey trial.
And eventually, after the Wall street crash and depression, the populists won with Roosevelt and his New Deal.
Not long after that the elitists split with the cultural elitists taking over the dem party while the economic populists stayed in the GOP. Then, using Nixons southern strategy, the GOP brought the cultural populists out of the dem party into the GOP.
Today, those two coalitions of (1)economic elitists & cultural populists in the GOP and (2) cultural elitists and economic populists in the dem party are both wearing thin.
Populists waves come with the changes.
So in the 19th/20th century these changes accompanied the integrating of the national economy and shifting from agrarian to industrial plus advances in communication and transportation.
In the 20th/21st century the changes come with integrating the world economy and shifting from industrial to information technology plus advances in communication and transportation systems.