Slavery: The Only Cause Of The Civil War

Albert Dietrich once wrote, “There are perhaps many causes worth dying for, but to me, certainly, there are none worth killing for” (36). When many think of what caused the Civil War, the first thing that pops into their head is slavery. This is what they teach us in elementary school. Every kid is taught about the North, the South, slavery, and Abraham Lincoln, but there was so much more to the Civil War than what was taught back then. First, slavery was not the only cause of the Civil War. There were many other issues besides slavery that had equal if not more influence on the start of the war. Two of these additional causes of the war, which began tensions between these two sides long before slavery, were politics and the economy. Politics
They believed that the central government should not be able to make laws that affect every state. Each state should have be able to make their own laws and be able to govern themselves, in the opinion of the Confederacy. This is why when they thought their constitutional rights were being violated and slavery was coming to an end, they decided to secede from the union. They believed that if they seceded that they could govern themselves and the state would have control. This can be seen in that after they seceded each state had its own standing army rather than one with contributions from each state (Conradofontanilla. "Political and Economic Causes of the American Civil War."). On the opposite side were those in the Union. They believed that there should be a strong centralized government to keep the Union together and in sync. They viewed the nation as one big state rather than a bunch of states forced to cooperate under one leader as the south did. Due to this fact, Abraham Lincoln had never originally planned to end slavery. He believed that the Constitution did not provide the federal government with the authority to end slavery (05/31/13, Eric Black). He
In the Union their economy was mainly dependent on industry. Due to this many of their cities and factories were connected by railroads. With their economy so heavily riding on factories and immigrant workers they had no need for slaves and by the time of the Civil War slavery had died off there for the most part. Due to this fact they felt that slavery was an unnecessary construct. Walt Whitman who worked as a nurse during the Civil War, wrote a poem that greatly reflected the idealistic nature of the North “I Hear America Singing” in which he goes through the jobs of people in the North and how he hears them “sing”. He mentions mechanics, a mason, a carpenter and many more, however never once mentions slaves or the fact that had only two years earlier been in a horrific war that threatened to tear the nation apart (Whitman 260). The Confederacy was almost the exact opposite when it came their economy. The economy of the South mainly relied on agriculture. In fact, their main crop was cotton. They believed themselves so secure with this crop as their mainstay that they actually referred to it as “King Cotton”. Even with their economic boom beginning to slow down in 1860 and the North’s holding steady, they believed that all they needed was the cotton to get them through. The only problem was that they needed the industry in the North to refine and transport the cotton. The North had trains and other