What caused the American Civil War?

[Rev. Rye]

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The North and the South did evolve to have very different economies. The south depended on agriculture. This caused the south to focus less on cities and more on rural developments. It also caused them to rely heavily on slavery. I used the term rely, as opposed to depend, because slavery was not, by any means, a necessity. But it gave them extra profit when they did not have to pay workers a constant wage. They could simply buy workers with a one time payment that went to someone else entirely. The north became industrialized. There, the people flocked to big cities to find works in places like factories, so the reliance on slavery was almost non-existent.

States' Rights was another cause of the war. I want to make it clear right now that, while I am a major proponent of states' rights, the issue of slavery was not a states' rights issue...it was a human rights issue. Therefore, I believe it was absolutely necessary for the federal government to get involved. But the southern states, at the time, did not view it that way. They viewed slaves as property, not humans. That means that they viewed anyone who would take away their slaves as people who were taking away their property. This, of course, made the south weary of any "tyrants" that wanted to steal their property.

The growing abolitionist movement made the south more paranoid. So, when an abolitionist was elected as the president of the United States, the south really began to worry about their economic future, property rights and states' rights. Even before Abraham Lincoln actually took office, while he was still president-elect, southern states began to succeed.

TLDR: There was no single cause of the Civil war. Multiple issues played into the situation that caused the war.

That said, Lincoln wasn't really much of an abolitionist. On one hand, he personally didn't approve of it, but in 1860, he admitted that he was only against expansion of slavery into the west and not the instutution itself. Even with the Emancipation Proclamation, it only covered the states that the Union had no control over, and the border states which still had slaves were exempt from its effects. It took his successor Andrew Johnson to free the slaves in a legally binding way.