Q: Was the American Civil War really about slavery?

Q: Was the American Civil War really about slavery?
A: Yes. Yes, it really was. The “states right” the secessionists truly cared about was slavery.

Q: So why the continuing controversy over the American Civil War?
A: Because, says Colonel Ty Seidule, Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point, “many people don’t want to believe that the citizens of the southern states were willing to fight and die to preserve a morally repugnant institution.”

 

For more information on the Civil War, check out :

• The West Point History of the Civil War, an interactive e-book that brings the Civil War to life in a way that's never been done. Click here -> The West Point History of the Civil War
• The Articles of Secession of the slave states, each of whom cited in seceding their motivating cause: i.e., their “peculiar institution” of slavery”
• The Confederate Vice President’s ‘Cornerstone Speech,’ declaring the Confederacy’s causes of secession: “The prevailing ideas entertained by [Thomas Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. …Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone 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 and normal condition. [Applause.]”
• The Lincoln-Douglas debates, wherein Lincoln sagely observed “a house divided against itself [by slavery] cannot stand.”

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