Historians past and present disagree sharply over the major cause of the Civil War.

Some writers have viewed the struggle of the 1860’s as a “war of rebellion” brought on by a “slavepower conspiracy.” To them it was a conflict between Northern “humanity” and Southern “barbarism.” James Ford Rhodes, who dealt more generously with the South than did many other Northern writers of his time, stated in 1913: “Of the American Civil War it may safely be asserted that there was a single cause, slavery.”

Other historians, such as Charles A. Beard and Harold U. Faulkner, have argued that slavery was only the surface issue. The real cause, these men state, was “the economic forces let loose by the Industrial Revolution” then taking place in the North. These economic forces were strong, powerful, and “beating irresistibly upon a one-sided and rather static” Southern way of life. Therefore, the 1860’s produced a “second American Revolution,” fought between the “capitalists, laborers, and farmers of the North and West” on the one hand, and the “planting aristocracy of the South” on the other.

A third theory advanced by historians is that the threat to states’ rights led to war. The conflict of the 1860’s was thus a “War between the States.” Many in this group believe that the U. S. Constitution of 1787 was but a compact, or agreement, between the independent states. Therefore, when a state did not like the policies of the central government, it had the right to withdraw—or secede—from this compact.

Still other writers believe “Southern nationalism” to have been the basic cause of the war. Southerners, they assert, had so strong a desire to preserve their particular way of life that they were willing to fight. This then became a struggle between rival sections whose differences could not be settled peacefully. The result was a “War for Southern Independence.”

A recent group of historians, known as “revisionists,” rejects these earlier theories. Leader of the revisionist school was the late James G. Randall, who once stated: “If one word or phrase were selected to account for the war, that word would not be slavery, or economic grievances, or states rights, or diverse civilizations. It would have to be such a word as fanaticism.” Another revisionist, Avery O. Craven, agrees. The Civil War, he wrote, resulted because the great mass of American people “permitted their short-sighted politicians, their overzealous editors, and their pious reformers” to control public opinion and action. Primarily through the slavery issue, these radicals created more and more hatred between North and South. In the end, and as a result of these radicals, the differences between the sections, swelled by “a blundering generation,” burst into a war.