[kthielen]

While it’s true to say that some northerners had other interests in fighting the civil war, there’s no clearer evidence of the cause and purpose of the civil war than the reasons cited by secessionist states for leaving the union. Yes it was about “states rights”, but specifically (as they themselves said) it was about the right of states to continue slavery.

You can say that people in the north weren’t angels, they certainly weren’t, and that there were other issues that motivated people to enter the war and fight for their side, there certainly were.

But the central issue of the civil war was slavery. If it was any other issue, the seceding states would have said it, and surely a compromise would have been reached (as in fact even today states have “rights” if not just the “right” to hold slaves).

[TedDoesntTalk]

> seceding states would have said it

They did. I get the feeling we’ve read different history books. So many reasons. What about the industrial north and the agricultural south? Played no part in the war, I’ve suspect you’d say. It was all slavery.

[abvdasker]

> What about the industrial north and the agricultural south?

Guess what kind of labor the economy of the "agricultural south" was dependent on at the time. The Civil War was primarily about slavery, especially the expansion of slavery westward. To argue the opposite is ahistorical nonsense so false it amounts to an outright lie.

Even the Confederacy was open about the fact that slavery was the reason for succession. Just read The Cornerstone Speech given by the vice president of the Confederacy weeks before the Civil War began:

> [The Confederacy's] foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

[kthielen]

> I get the feeling we’ve read different history books.

I get the feeling we've read different history.

Forget books or opinions provided by other people many years after the fact, forget my opinion, just look at what the seceding states themselves said to justify their secession.

For example, here's South Carolina: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp

The VERY FIRST sentence identifies the reason to secede being that the northern states are refusing to send back their fugitive slaves!

And if it's not clear enough for you, they repeat it in more detail just a little further down in the document:

---

"In the present case, that fact is established with certainty. We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof.

The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: "No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."

This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made. The greater number of the contracting parties held slaves, and they had previously evinced their estimate of the value of such a stipulation by making it a condition in the Ordinance for the government of the territory ceded by Virginia, which now composes the States north of the Ohio River."