The War Between the States, aka War of Northern Aggression, was indirectly caused by slavery, but not for the reasons you're told. Northern industry could not compete with the South because of the South's utilization of cheap labor. No, slavery was not "free" labor because their room and board and other living expenses were provided for, and some slaves even earned a small wage. The Northern industrialists began funding the Abolitionist movement, including John Brown and the propaganda piece called Uncle Tom's Cabin (a complete work of fiction written by a woman who had never been to the South or met an actual slave) in an effort to create slave revolts and undermine the system. When that didn't work, they moved on to implementing tariffs on Southern goods to the point that the price of cotton from South Carolina jumped from something like $0.02/ton to $0.12/ton. South Carolina and the other Southern states tried everything they could up to secession and when that didn't work, South Carolina decided to secede in order to renegotiate their tariff. In response to the secession, Lincoln decided to ignore the SC governor's pleas to remove Federal troops from Ft. Sumter since it belonged to the now independent SC, and instead sent reinforcements. South Carolina responded as they said they would and attacked the fort. The North responded by blockading Charleston, which set in motion the chain of secessions across the South and the creation of the CSA. Aside from this stuff which you'll only learn from reading a real history book (rather than a propaganda textbook), there are two major points to consider: 1) slavery was vastly different from state to state. Maryland and Virginia had large farms and small plantations with a handful of slaves, whereas Alabama and Louisiana had their vast plantations of hundreds of slaves. The vast majority of these slaves were treated well and fairly, and to read interviews with them, many of them enjoyed their lives. 2) The North brought in hoards of immigrants, mostly from Ireland, to man their factories with cheap labor and to staff the Federal army. Lincoln was their man because he had been a railroad lawyer prior to becoming president. He had his own railroad car, which was like owning a private jet in those days. My final point that you'll never hear from the court historians is what happened to the "free" slaves after the war. Tens of thousands were starved to death in the Devil's Punchbowl, and thousands more died from starvation and exposure. Millions of negroes were released with zero life skills beyond picking cotton and many of those who didn't die turned to crime, which lead to the rise of vigilante gangs like the Ku Klux Klan as a way to secure rule of law and to engage in guerilla warfare to expel the Yankee occupiers. Had the war been a great crusade to free the noble negro, the North would have had a plan to reintegrate them into the world, but it clearly was an economic war which turned into a crusade to "preserve the Union".