What was the cause of the American Civil War?

If I recall correctly we had a pretty legit history teacher. He went into the federal overreach and fully explained that it wasn’t about slavery. He was a huge JFK conspiracy theorist, too.

What they didn’t teach us was that Abe Lincoln looked down up the blacks much like the southerners and he found them to also be inferior. Or that the Union soldiers basically enslaved them after they were captured/freed/however you want to word that.

Northern agretion

It was about states rights, as in a state's right to allow slavery or not. To claim it wasn't about the slavery issue is pure revisionist history. The south was adamant in keeping the number of slave states and free states equal in number so they could block any anti-slavery legislation in the senate.

Nope

I was taught it was basically all about slavery.

As an adult I learned it was more about taxation. I'd actually like to learn more

hell i don't even remember what i was taught in school. grew up in CA so it wasn't a big deal. "some people did some things"

Same here. I’ve always wanted to delve more into the Revolutionary and Civil Wars but always find myself drawn to WWI and WWII. When I was collecting WWII rifles that just cemented my interests. I can’t afford to collect rifles from the prior mentioned wars. Haha!

Another revisionist who ignores facts.


Slavery


The burning issue that led to the disruption of the union was the debate over the future of slavery. That dispute led to secession, and secession brought about a war in which the Northern and Western states and territories fought to preserve the Union, and the South fought to establish Southern independence as a new confederation of states under its own constitution.

The agrarian South utilized slaves to tend its large plantations and perform other duties. On the eve of the Civil War, some 4 million Africans and their descendants toiled as slave laborers in the South. Slavery was interwoven into the Southern economy even though only a relatively small portion of the population actually owned slaves. Slaves could be rented or traded or sold to pay debts. Ownership of more than a handful of slaves bestowed respect and contributed to social position, and slaves, as the property of individuals and businesses, represented the largest portion of the region’s personal and corporate wealth, as cotton and land prices declined and the price of slaves soared.

The states of the North, meanwhile, one by one had gradually abolished slavery. A steady flow of immigrants, especially from Ireland and Germany during the potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s, insured the North a ready pool of laborers, many of whom could be hired at low wages, diminishing the need to cling to the institution of slavery.

I was going to let this play out some so more actual history would be discussed, but to my point: Not a single southern state’s articles of secession say anything about war

all of this talk about MS flag puts me off on both sides because the stories are told as southern states “fought” for slavery

What facts?

I grew up in the south and we were taught that it was all about states' rights and had virtually nothing to do with slavery. These days, it seems like kids are being taught that it was all about the virtuous crusade of Lincoln and the Union to free the slaves. The reality is somewhere in between. At the end of the day, there were a lot of societal and economic differences between the north and the south and it all came to a boiling head. Slavery was a huge part of it.

Because a lot of the southern states relied on slavery for agricultural needs, correct? As stated above I don’t know a lot about the Civil War and won’t claim to, so this is just me digging for information.

I have a black friend who swears there were black sharecroppers who were wealthy and slave owners in the Carolinas. Finding truth on that is damn near impossible today.

Facts like northern states were the first to want to secede from the Union? Why did they want to secede pre-Lincoln?

CA vs MS. I’m not surprised by the disagreement. There is always more to the story.

The south as a whole was treated as a second class nation for years. Slavery and it’s abolishment was the trigger of a festering problem.


there are a lot of stories like your friends’ that aren’t a part of the standard curriculum, but many are true. That is the revisionist history

The narrative would have you believe that every white person in the south was a whip slinging slaver and worth a fortune. Far from the truth. My family was here and dirt poor up until the 1950s.