Was the American Civil War fought because of slavery?

More than 150 years later, this remains a controversial question.

Why?

Because 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.

There has to be another reason we are told.

Well, there isn't.

The evidence is clear and overwhelming.

slavery was, by a wide margin, the single most important cause of the Civil War, for both

sides.

Before the presidential election of 1860, a South Carolina newspaper warned that the issue

before the country was the extinction of slavery, and called on all who were not prepared to

surrender the institution to act.

Shortly after Abraham Lincoln's victory, they did.

The secession documents of every southern state made clear, crystal clear, that they

were leaving the union in order to protect their peculiar institution of slavery.

A phrase that at the time meant the thing special to them.

The vote to secede was 169-0 in South Carolina, 166-7 in Texas, 84-15 in Mississippi.

In no southern state was the vote close.

Alexander Stevens of Georgia, the Confederacy's Vice President, clearly articulated the

views of the South in March 1861.

Our new government, he said, was founded on slavery.

...