Slavery as the True Cause of the American Civil War
This essay examines the competing explanations for the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, weighing the argument of states' rights against the more fundamental cause of slavery. Drawing on the words of Jefferson Davis, Alabama Commissioner S.F. Hale, Abraham Lincoln, and a Charleston Mercury editorial, the paper argues that while Southern leaders framed secession as a constitutional matter, the preservation of slavery — as an economic institution worth billions and as the social foundation of the Confederacy — was the true driving force behind the conflict. The essay also briefly addresses Reconstruction and the lasting consequences of the war for African Americans.
- Introduction: Competing Explanations for the Civil War: Fort Sumter, war's origins, thesis introduced
- The States' Rights Argument in the Confederate South: Nullification, sovereignty, and Southern political grievances
- Confederate Leaders on Secession and Sovereignty: Davis inaugural address and Hale letter analyzed
- Slavery as the Foundation of Southern Society: Slavery as economic and political cornerstone of Confederacy
- Lincoln, Emancipation, and the Fight to End Slavery: Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln's evolving antislavery stance
- Southern Fears and the Road to War: Charleston Mercury editorial and inevitability of conflict
- Reconstruction and the Enduring Legacy of the Civil War: Postwar Reconstruction, Grant's verdict, lasting consequences
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What makes this paper effective
- Uses primary source voices — Jefferson Davis's inaugural address, S.F. Hale's letter, Lincoln's correspondence, and a Charleston Mercury editorial — to let historical actors speak for themselves.
- Maintains a clear argumentative stance throughout: states' rights is addressed and refuted before the slavery thesis is developed, creating a logical compare-and-contrast structure.
- Grounds abstract political debates in concrete economic detail, such as Hale's $4 billion valuation of slave property, which makes the Southern position tangible and comprehensible.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of the "concede and refute" technique: it opens by fairly presenting the states' rights position — including direct quotations from Confederate leaders — before systematically dismantling it by showing that states' rights claims were inseparable from, and ultimately subordinate to, the defense of slavery. This structure strengthens the paper's central argument by acknowledging the opposing view rather than ignoring it.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with the attack on Fort Sumter and introduces the two competing causes. It then devotes several paragraphs to the states' rights argument, drawing on Davis and Hale. The middle section pivots to slavery as the primary cause, tracing Lincoln's evolving position from his 1855 letter through the Emancipation Proclamation. An editorial from the Charleston Mercury provides a Southern insider's acknowledgment that slavery — not abstract sovereignty — was the real stakes. The essay closes with a brief look at Reconstruction and a synthesizing quotation from Ulysses S. Grant.
Introduction: Competing Explanations for the Civil War
In the early months of 1861, a large contingent of Confederate troops opened fire on Fort Sumter in the state of South Carolina, an event which some historians believe marked the beginning of one of the most disruptive and violent periods in American history. Known in the North as the Civil War, this major conflict has been a heated topic of debate for more than a hundred years, especially regarding exactly what caused it to occur in the first place. Some place the blame on states' rights, arguing that the Southern states wished to conduct their affairs without infringement from the Union government.
However, most historians agree that the main cause of the Civil War was the issue of slavery — particularly the South's insistence that slavery must be allowed to spread beyond the Mississippi River and into the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. Thus, in contrast to what most Southerners fervently believed and supported, the true cause of the American Civil War, also known as the War Between the States, was the great social and political struggle to bring an end to slavery, an institution upon which the South greatly depended for its very existence.
The States' Rights Argument in the Confederate South
The issue of states' rights deserves examination first, due to its popularity among the people of the Deep South, many of whom overwhelmingly depended upon the institution of slavery in order to survive financially and to continue the age-old plantation system for the cultivation of cotton and tobacco. Overall, most Southerners were convinced that the Union government — around 1860, just after the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States — was creating and ratifying laws and regulations that discriminated against their so-called rights to own slaves and profit from their sale at auction.
These Southerners also believed "that individual states had the right to nullify or overturn any law" ("Causes of the Civil War," Internet) passed or ratified by the Union government, due to the conviction that each Southern state was a sovereign entity. In addition, they believed that each state "had the right to leave" the Union and create its own independent nation. However, "most people in the North believed that these concepts of nullification and states' rights" ("Causes of the Civil War," Internet) threatened the national security of the country and permitted citizens of the South to practice a form of laissez-faire government — all at the expense of African Americans who toiled in the fields from sunup to sundown as slaves.
Confederate Leaders on Secession and Sovereignty
As to the alleged right of Southern states to secede from the Union, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America (CSA), did not hold back his feelings in his inaugural speech of February 1861. "It is the right of the people," Davis declared, "to alter or abolish governments whenever they become destructive to the ends for which they were established" ("Causes of the Civil War," Internet) — a clear reference to the Declaration of Independence, which states that the people have the right to overthrow a government they find corrupt, inadequate, or out of date.
Davis also made abundantly clear that the reason behind states such as South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia withdrawing from the Union was to "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and to secure" the blessings of American liberty for all Southerners ("Causes of the Civil War," Internet). However, what Davis really meant was that all white Southerners deserved the privileges and rights of freedom and liberty, while slaves remained without any rights whatsoever — regarded as little more than second-class citizens on a social level with animals.
One other important source related to states' rights in the Confederate South comes from a letter written by S.F. Hale, Commissioner of the state of Alabama, to the governor of Kentucky in 1860, just prior to the attack on Fort Sumter. Hale offers the proposition that "Whenever any form of government" — in this case the federal government in Washington, D.C. — "becomes destructive . . . It is the inalienable right and the duty of the people to alter or abolish it" ("Causes of the Civil War," Internet), especially when such a government attempts to enforce the notion that slavery is morally wrong and must be eliminated.
Slavery as the Foundation of Southern Society
Hale also points out in his letter that slavery, as an institution in the Confederate states, serves as the foundation for political power and that, since slaves are viewed as property, they must be protected like any other form of property — a home, a farm, or one's bank account. Hale states that slavery "has not only become . . . the fixed domestic institution" of the Confederacy but also forms "an important element of its political power" and represents "the most valuable species of . . . property," estimated at somewhere in the area of $4 billion ("Causes of the Civil War," Internet). It is therefore easy to understand why the people of the Confederacy saw states' rights as the true cause of the war: if such rights were taken away by the federal government, the political power and influence of the South would vanish, leaving it a broken shell of its former self.
As to the issue of slavery being the actual cause of the Civil War's outbreak in 1861, most Americans living in the North — in states such as Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York — and those with strong ties to anti-slavery movements considered the institution of slavery a highly immoral and racially based system that utilized slave labor for financial gain and for the spread of anti-abolitionist propaganda throughout the North. In other words, a majority of white Northerners sensed that something terrible was looming: that the issue of slavery in the South would eventually culminate in some type of conflict which would cause the South to collapse under the weight of its own flagrant disregard for the rights of all Americans, especially African Americans.
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