What caused the American Civil War?

Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: What caused the American Civil War?
Position1 of 2›: Slavery
Argument‹2 of 4›: 1860 Presidential election

The election of Abraham Lincoln, representing the young abolitionist Republican Party, in the 1860 Election was the tipping point for many Southerns to actually secede.

The argument

On this account the election of 1860 is the clearest evidence that slavery caused the American Civil War, because it shows what the Southern states took themselves to be responding to when they left the Union. The Republican Party had been regarded as radical from its founding in 1854, precisely because of its abolitionist stance, and it rose to predominance in the north as the Democratic and Whig parties splintered. By 1860, with Abraham Lincoln as its nominee, it campaigned on a more moderate and diversified platform that advocated western expansion and development, but, proponents stress, abolition remained at the party's core. The moderation was presentational; the commitment was not abandoned. That distinction carries the argument. Had the Republican platform of 1860 been simply a programme of expansion and internal development, Lincoln's victory would have been an ordinary transfer of power. What made it something else, on this view, was the abolitionist commitment beneath the moderate campaign: Lincoln's election on 6 November 1860 was read in the South as a direct threat to Southerners' use of slaves, and so as a threat to the labour system on which the Southern order rested. No law had yet been changed and no slave had yet been freed; the threat was prospective, and the reaction was immediate all the same. The timing is treated as decisive. The election functioned as the tipping point, after which several Southern states moved to secede, South Carolina first, on 20 December 1860, a matter of weeks after the result. Proponents argue that a sequence this tight identifies the grievance: the decisive change in that interval was the prospect of a federal government whose governing party held abolition at its core. Secession followed the threat to slavery, so slavery is what the war was fought over.

Premises

[P1]The Republican Party rose to prominence on an abolitionist platform, and despite a more moderate, diversified 1860 campaign, abolition remained at its core. [P2] Lincoln's election in November 1860 represented a direct threat to Southerners' use of slaves, acting as the tipping point that drove South Carolina and other Southern states to secede from the Union. [C] Therefore the 1860 presidential election demonstrates that slavery was the cause of the American Civil War.

Counter-arguments

Lincoln's election was simply representative of the growing wave of Northern support for emancipation that had already existed years previously. The 1860 election was not in and of itself a cause of the Civil War.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] It was not the election itself that caused the secession of the Southern states.