The main reason for the Civil War was not slavery, as many people think; the main causes of the conflict lay in the economic sphere.
The reason for the full-scale war was the battle for Fort Sumter and the subsequent separation of the seven southern states from the United States, which was contrary to the Constitution, which did not allow states to leave the Union.
The controversy surrounding slavery was raised to the surface of public life during discussions about state rights and tariff policies. Additional factors that exacerbated relations between the North and the South were the contradictions between political parties, abolitionism, nationalism and local patriotism, territorial expansion, the economic crisis and the modernization of the economy in the pre-war period.
The division of states into northern and southern developed in the colonial era. The fast-growing economies of the Northeast and Midwest of the United States were based on free farming, industrialization, transport system development and commerce. Slavery here was prohibited by state law. The industrialization and influx of immigrants from Europe, mainly of Irish, British and German descent, led to an accelerated population growth in these states.
Slave owners traditionally dominated in the South. Although the population was also growing here, its growth rate was significantly lower than in the North. Southern cities were much smaller than northern ones, and industry remained undeveloped. Although two-thirds of the white population did not have slaves, they were predominantly hired laborers from wealthy planters who had complete control over the economy and political life of the southern states.
Although at the beginning of US history, the southern states had great political weight at the federal level, demographic changes and a fairly broad suffrage ultimately led the South to lose its former influence. In the 1860 presidential election, the northern states represented more votes than the southern ones; their candidate, Abraham Lincoln, became president despite losing in ten southern states, which provoked strong discontent in the South.
In the North, discontent ripened even longer. Here slavery was condemned not only as a social evil, but also as an immoral phenomenon, which in religious America always had a context of inter-confessional contradictions. In the interests of the unity of the nation, politicians at the federal level had long been able to find a compromise between the differences between the North and the South. So in 1820 the Missouri Compromise was adopted, according to which new states were accepted into the Union in pairs, one slaveholding, the other "free" from slavery. A similar political compromise was reached in 1850. But such compromises only delayed the solution of the problem.
In the mid-1800s, former political parties left the stage, giving way to new ones. Of these, the Republican Party relied on voters from the North and sought a ban on slavery throughout the United States. Although in 1854 a new compromise was made in the form of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which left the choice of slavery to the discretion of local elected bodies, in fact it provoked a civil war in Kansas, which became a prelude to the Civil War between the North and the South ten years later.
