Causes of Civil War

American Civil War. This fratricidal conflict was brought about by a combination of factors of which the most important were the following: (1) economic and social forces which intensified sectional rivalries between the North and South; (2) the issue of slavery and in particular its extension to the Western territories which became the focal point of political controversy after 1844; and (3) a systemic failure of the political center and a decline in the quality of its leadership which proved incapable after 1854 of holding the Union together against escalating pressures from extremists on both sides.

The bitter controversies which led up to the Civil War, the savage and bloody fighting of the war and its tragic epilogue have ever since plagued attempts by historians to come to grips with the causes of that war. Historian Pressly said in 1954 that "the further the Civil War receded into the past, the greater the disagreement among twentieth century historians over its causes" (224). William H. Seward, a Northern Republican, in 1858 labelled the impending conflict the "Irrepressible Conflict," an unavoidable conflict between incompatible ways of life (13). For others, especially the revisionist historians of the early 20th century, a generation of blundering political leaders had allowed the nation to drift into a needless war.

Intensification of Sectional Rivalry and Conflict 1

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litary and ideological imperatives of the war, but his biographer Oates says that Lincoln always believed that "separation of the races was the only long-term solution" and favored the colonization of blacks elsewhere (161). Even on the eve of the war, he told the South "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists" (Foote 39). Nevertheless, Lincoln believed, as he told a group of black leaders in 1862, that "but for your race, there could not be war" (Oates 239). While few historians have agreed with historian James Ford Rhodes that "it may be safely asserted that there was a single cause [of the war], slavery," most of them agree that slavery, or what Nevins called the problem of "permanent race adjustment," was the central defining issue which led to war (Nevins, Ordeal of the Union 211 and 201). In the early part of the century, slavery was declining in economic importance. The shift in the late 1820s from farming in tobacco and other cash crops to King Cotton, which became the mainstay of the Southern economy, "fixed slavery as a permanent institution" in the ante-bellum South (Osterweis 134). While some Southerners agreed with Jefferson that "slavery
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