What caused the American Civil War?

[Rev. Rye]

The "cause" of the war was the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter. Recall Lincoln's First Inaugural address: In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.


The reasons behind that attack are complex in the extreme. Certainly slavery was an issue but 95% of southerners were hard-scrabble farmers who owned no slaves. Of the remainder, most owned only one or two. It was the aristocracy (the planter class) which owned the bulk. How to explain the eager participation by the vast non-slaveholding majority is the problem.

I think the best explanation for this was that, the attitudes of the rich conservative men aren't too different from the attitudes many would have expressed at the time of Lincoln's election, and, while there was no Fox News, there would certainly be a lot of politicians with connections to that class who would have wanted to not alienate their friends.