Is it possible that the Civil War was about more than just slavery?

By William Sullivan

In one of my favorite Simpsons episodes from my teenage years, the friendly, if perpetually price-gouging, Kwik-E-Mart clerk Apu Nahasapeemapetilon endures a line of questioning from an examiner in order to attain U.S. citizenship:

Examiner: Here’s your last question. What was the cause of the Civil War?

Apu: Actually, there were numerous causes.  Aside from the obvious schism between the abolitionists and the anti-abolitionists, there were economic factors, both domestic and inter…

Examiner: Wait, wait… just say slavery.

Apu: Slavery it is, sir!

The writers’ jab here is pretty simple.  Apu, though an immigrant (albeit, one with a PhD), knows more about America and its history than many of our own citizens.

I understood this joke as a kid, so it’s mind-boggling to me to hear incredibly smart Americans play the role of the examiner in the above comedic bit in response to any suggestion that there might be a more complex, nuanced rationale for the Civil War.    

Great thinkers on the right routinely tout that Abraham Lincoln led the war against the South to free the slaves. And because the South was Democrat and the North was Republican, it’s somehow this great historical honor that we Republicans own.

Never do they address the problems with that assertion.  That is, if the Union’s war was a moral war intended to eliminate slavery (which it most certainly was not, at least in the early years of the war), that still presents potentially problematic constitutional implications of federal overreach.  If it wasn’t a war intended to eliminate slavery, the other factors involved must be considered, and a more evenhanded appraisal than “the North was good” and “the South was evil” must be discussed.

I will begin by conceding an important point.  Slavery was a primary cause of the Civil War, particularly insofar as Lincoln’s election in 1860 was the tipping point in a longstanding and bitter debate over slavery in which the two sides had, going back to the American Revolution, been defined as “slave states” and “free states.” 

But to suggest that there weren’t other, very serious factors involved which led to the conflict is an intellectually obtuse position.

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Articles: Is it possible that the Civil War was about more than just slavery?