I'm constantly having the media tell me over and over that the Civil War was 100% over slavery, which is starting to make me unsure of it all now.
I can someone give me the non-Google approved™ TL;DR of the civil war? Why was the south willing to fight to the death with the north?
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You don't even need to look at the civil war itself. Just the outcome: 14, 15, and 16th amendments. It was absolutely about slavery.
>Northern states are starting to undergo industrialization and fill their factories with newly arriving immigrants, some Northern states still have slavery
>Southern states are still very agricultural and a big part of that economy is sustained through use of slave labor
>The issue of slavery has always been touchy but accepted as necessary, at least until things change
>Compromise that for every two new states admitted to the Union, one will prohibit slavery and one will allow it
>Lincoln gives his "house divided" speech that says the US is eventually going to have to decide if it allows slaves or not, the half and half thing won't last forever
>It fires up Abolitionists who primarily live in the North
>Election of 1860
>Newspapers convince Southerners that Lincoln is an Abolitionist
>If this is true then Lincoln's election could mean the South losing it slaves and destroying its economy, the North in comparison would barely be effected
>Lincoln is elected
>South fears the worst, that their affairs will be determined by people not familiar with their situation, and says "Not my President"
>Secession
>Confederacy formed
>Eventually US Fort Sumter is fired upon by Confederates who see it as a foreign military in their land
>Civil War starts
It was pretty much over slavery. That was the reason for secession. If you want to go deeper into it, the southern elite who owned the slaves needed/wanted new slaves states to be admitted. That would increase the demand for slaves, which would have increased the value of their stock. With Lincoln's election, there was a fear that no new slave states would be admitted, so they took the second best option, secession. This may or may not have been legal, but they fired on a Federal fort, which was sufficient casus belli to go to war.
The Civil War was not over states' rights, which was a post hoc justification. Before the war, there was a Federal law called the Fugitive Slave Act that required free states to return escaped slaves. The free states were lax in carrying this out. The southern states wanted more Federal oversight, to force the free states to obey the Fugitive Slave Act. They were federalists, not states' rights advocates. After secession, they wrote an analog of the Fugitive Slave Act into their constitution. Their constitution also required that any territory they acquired would also have slavery; they would not admit a free state. Other than that, their constitution was basically a copy of the USA constitution.
That fort is the key to the start of the war.
Imagine a military building in the south owned by the US that suddenly the confederates take over. No compensation. Just it is ours now.
I could see this scenario happen again. Texas has a lot of US government property.
No, Sumter was then in Confederate lands but manned by Union troops. They were given several days(this was before hostilities) to evacuate and withdraw freely, but they chose not to.
Eventually the south went all "GET OFF MY LAWN" and the war started.
>I can someone give me the non-Google approved™ TL;DR of the civil war?
Most of the popular support for the war in the North was based on keeping the Union together. Most of the popular support in the South was about states' rights. Most people in the South didn't have slaves and it wasn't important to them.
Unfortunately the South didn't have much a choice but to try to cling to slavery. Those slaves were incredibly valuable too since (legally) no more could be brought over from Africa since 1807, so the only slaves were coming in through being born and sold in the US.
The South's economy needed a lot of workers and slavery was how it had been done so that's how they kept it. Most immigrants stayed north in the cities.
They also didn't have the luxury of the British Empire where slavery could be abolished because there were colonies you could have grow your cotton, tobacco, etc.
The whole thing is certainly disgusting and would have no place in today's world, but then was not today. Though some people insist on judging people from then by today's standards.
Slavery was the reason but the question wasn't "Can slavery continue or not" but rather "Does the government have the right to abolish it?"
States Rights vs Federal Power was an issue and focus was on Slavery
Sadly, this meant that when the South lost the Fed reigned supreme over the states thereafter
For any war to determine the motivation just look at where the money is. Fact is, slave owners didn't want to use their slaves. They said state sovereignty guaranteed that the Federal government had no authority to take those slaves away. So when it looked like this was inevitable they decided to leave the Union and make a new one.
Northerners did NOT go to war to end slavery but to preserve the Union. Slavery was only ended later, and not in the North at first, for STRATEGIC reasons
The Confederates offered to buy the fort from the Union
They fired on it when Lincoln sent down a ship to evacuate, or the the South thought, reinforce the Fort