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Historians debating the origins of the American Civil War focus on the reasons why seven Southern states declared their secession from the United States (the Union), why they united to form the Confederate States of America (the "Confederacy"), and why the North refused to let them go. While textbooks today all state that conflicts over slavery caused the war, they disagree sharply regarding which kinds of conflict—ideological, economic, political, or social—was most important.〔Aaron Sheehan-Dean, "A Book for Every Perspective: Current Civil War and Reconstruction Textbooks," ''Civil War History'' (2005) 51#3 pp 317-324〕 The primary catalyst for secession was slavery, especially Southern anger at the attempts by Northern antislavery political forces to block the expansion of slavery into the western territories. Another explanation for secession, and the subsequent formation of the Confederacy, was Southern nationalism.〔John McCardell, ''The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830-1860'' (1981)〕 The primary reason for the North to reject secession was to preserve the Union, a cause based on American nationalism.〔Susan-Mary Grant, ''North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era'' (2000)〕 Most of the debate is about the first question, as to why the Southern states decided to secede. Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election without being on the ballot in ten of the Southern states. His victory triggered declarations of secession by seven slave states of the Deep South, whose economies were all based on cotton cultivated using slave labor. They formed the Confederate States of America before Lincoln took office. Nationalists (in the North and "Unionists" in the South) refused to recognize the declarations of secession. No foreign country's government ever recognized the Confederacy. The U.S. government under President James Buchanan refused to relinquish its forts that were in territory claimed by the Confederacy. The war itself began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces bombarded Fort Sumter, a major U.S. fortress in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. As a panel of historians emphasized in 2011, "while slavery and its various and multifaceted discontents were the primary cause of disunion, it was disunion itself that sparked the war."〔Elizabeth R. Varon, Bruce Levine, Marc Egnal, and Michael Holt at a plenary session of the organization of American Historians, March 17, 2011, reported by David A. Walsh "Highlights from the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Houston, Texas" (HNN online )〕 Pulitzer Prize winning author David Potter wrote, "The problem for Americans who, in the age of Lincoln, wanted slaves to be free was not simply that southerners wanted the opposite, but that they themselves cherished a conflicting value: they wanted the Constitution, which protected slavery, to be honored, and the Union, which had fellowship with slaveholders, to be preserved. Thus they were committed to values that could not logically be reconciled."〔David Potter, The Impending Crisis, page 45 (This book won the Pulitzer Prize for History)〕 Other important factors were partisan politics, abolitionism, Southern nationalism, Northern nationalism, expansionism, economics and modernization in the Antebellum period. ==Geography and demographics of North and South== The United States had become a nation of two distinct regions. The free states in New England, the Northeast, and the Midwest〔The Mason–Dixon line and the Ohio River were key boundaries.〕 had a rapidly growing economy based on family farms, industry, mining, commerce and transportation, with a large and rapidly growing urban population. Their growth was fed by a high birth rate and large numbers of European immigrants, especially British, Irish and German. The South was dominated by a settled plantation system based on slavery. There was some rapid growth taking place in the Southwest (e.g., Texas), based on high birth rates and high migration from the Southeast, but it had a much lower immigration rate from Europe. The heavily rural South had few cities of any size, and little manufacturing except in border areas. Slave owners controlled politics and economics, although about 75% of Southern white families owned no slaves and usually were engaged in subsistence agriculture. Overall, the Northern population was growing much more quickly than the Southern population, which made it increasingly difficult for the South to continue to influence the national government. By the time of the 1860 election, the heavily agricultural southern states as a group had fewer Electoral College votes than the rapidly industrializing northern states. Lincoln was able to win the 1860 Presidential election without even being on the ballot in ten Southern states. Southerners felt a loss of federal concern for Southern pro-slavery political demands, and their continued domination of the Federal government was threatened. This political calculus provided a very real basis for Southerners' worry about the relative political decline of their region due to the North growing much faster in terms of population and industrial output. In the interest of maintaining unity, politicians had mostly moderated opposition to slavery, resulting in numerous compromises such as the Missouri Compromise of 1820. After the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848, the issue of slavery in the new territories led to the Compromise of 1850. While the compromise averted an immediate political crisis, it did not permanently resolve the issue of the Slave power (the power of slaveholders to control the national government on the slavery issue). Part of the 1850 compromise was the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, requiring that Northerners assist Southerners in reclaiming fugitive slaves, which many Northerners found to be extremely offensive. Amid the emergence of increasingly virulent and hostile sectional ideologies in national politics, the collapse of the old Second Party System in the 1850s hampered efforts of the politicians to reach yet one more compromise. The compromise that was reached (the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act) outraged many northerners, and led to the formation of the Republican Party, the first major party with no appeal in the South. The industrializing North and agrarian Midwest became committed to the economic ethos of free-labor industrial capitalism. Arguments that slavery was undesirable for the nation had long existed, and early in U.S. history were made even by some prominent Southerners. After 1840, abolitionists denounced slavery as not only a social evil but a moral wrong. Many Northerners, especially leaders of the new Republican Party, considered slavery a great national evil and believed that a small number of Southern owners of large plantations controlled the national government with the goal of spreading that evil. Southern defenders of slavery, for their part, increasingly came to contend that blacks actually benefited from slavery, an assertion that alienated Northerners even further. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Origins of the American Civil War」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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