What Was the Cause of the American Civil War?

A. Plan of Investigation (381 words)

I. Question: What was the cause of the American Civil War?

II. Methods:

a. Search for secondary sources regarding sectionalism between 1840 and 1861, as well as on the topic of cause of the Civil War. Also search for primary documents that state points referring to the implication of sectionalism in the war.

b. Consult the works of the following sources:

1st Side: Frank L. Owsley: An American historian who specialized in Southern American history, and served as the president of the Southern Historical Association; a group organization of historians formed for the preservation and promotion of Southern American history. Several of Owsley's works, including a secondary source: The Fundamental Cause of the Civil War, were published in the Journal of Southern History run by the Southern Historical Association. This will be the principal resource that will be consulted which concludes that the Civil War was caused by sectionalism. Owsley also gives the conclusion that "[Lincoln's Gettysburg Address] has little if any value as a statement of the basic principles underlying the war" and "'that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth' is irrelevant"; these points will contrast the following primary source in an academic debate.

2nd Side: Abraham Lincoln: Abraham Lincoln was the President of the United States during the Civil War and campaigned for a free government and the equality of all men. A specific primary document that proves Lincoln's motifs in office is his Speech at Gettysburg. The speech concludes that the war was being fought over the inequality of the Negro to the White man and thus the cause of the war being slavery. His Northern voice will debate against Owsley's Southern motif.

B. Summary of Evidence (639 words)

Perhaps the most beautiful, the most poetic, the most eloquent statement of what the Civil War was not fought for is Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

[...]the overwhelming majority of white families in the South, slaveholders and nonslaveholders, unlike the industrial population of the East, owned the means of production.

[…] the southern population that they were prepared to fight a long and devastating war to accomplish a separation. On the other hand, the North was willing to fight a war to retain their reluctant fellow citizens under the same government with themselves.

Our national state was built, not upon the foundations of a homogeneous land and people, but upon geographical sections inhabited severally by provincial, self-conscious, self-righteous, aggressive, and ambitious populations of varying origins and diverse social and economic systems.

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