1. It was completely about slavery, as noted by the Southerners themselves. 2. Slavery was exceptionally valuable and growing throughout the 1850s in the South, so I find it difficult to believe that slavery was on it's way out, particularly when the South replaced slavery with de facto slavery in sharecropping. 3. Reconstruction was ruined by Andrew Johnson when he emboldened Southern recalcitrance with his exceptionally lenient treatment of former Confederates and acceptance of the Black Codes. Later revisionism by groups like the Dunning School have bastardized the story of Reconstruction into one of Southern victimization, but the real loss were the gains made by blacks in a small window of time that were discarded by the Redeemers as the period of Reconstruction ended (And the North didn't give a damn about preserving them for blacks at that point, either.). Of course, it was always going to be a stretch for Southern whites to go from seeing black people as inferior property to having equal rights, but the next 100 years of racial division were certainly enabled by those outside the South, as well.
Not completely about slavery. It was a component but by no means the only component. Share cropping was as much about white folks trying to continue to control blacks as much as it was about lingering resentment about their treatment postwar. The financial ruin brought on the South as punishment for rebelling played a big part in why things played out the way they did for 100 years. Like IP said, had cooler heads prevailed and the war averted, I have no doubt that this country would be very different in terms of race relations and regional perception than it is now but that's just my speculation.
This ought to have its own thread as the conversation has turned away from remembering the heroes Pearl Harbor to something else...
At this point, does it matter? Go get an unbiased (as unbiased as possible, anyway...) history book and read it carefully. First off, define your term. Do you mean the institution of slavery itself? Lincoln himself said the war was about preserving the Union. If he could do it without freeing slaves he would do it. If he could do it BY freeing the slaves he'd go that route too. If you mean that slavery was the underlying cause (states rights, economic exploitation etc.) I could buy into that a bit more but the Civil War was not fought to free slaves. End of story.
There's no war without the issue of slavery and, really, no conflict. Southern governments clearly outlined in their speeches and declarations of secession that they were fighting to preserve slavery. The Declarations of Secession are wholesale testimonies to their cause. There were ancillary and unrelated issues between the two regions, but none of them were of the variety in which would have caused war in any way. The South had zero interest in absolving themselves of the institution of slavery, which was the real cause of issues of race relations as the Civil War becomes inevitable, unless the North simply would've allowed the South to leave. Otherwise, race relations would've been the same, or worse, without the reckoning that was the Civil War. White Southerners, Civil War and Reconstruction or not, would've adopted policies that kept the social, legal and extra-legal situation as close to what occurred as possible. At every point, that society and region had to be dragged into equality kicking and screaming, the most recent time in my own parents' lifetime.
Context matters here, as Lincoln, while maintaining the Union was his priority in the fight, was trying to retain slave border states. However as he noted in his Second Inaugural Address; One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. Not only this, but the Vice President of the Confederacy noted the same 4 years earlier in his "Cornerstone Speech" when he said; The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. The South very much thought that the war was about preserving their right to own slaves. It's really disingenuous for any historian to argue otherwise and I've seen practically no one of any repute trying to do so outside of some Lost Cause types that still linger around.
