What caused the American Civil War?

Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: What caused the American Civil War?
Position1 of 2›: Slavery
Argument‹4 of 4: John Brown at Harper’s Ferry

Northern abolitionist John Brown failed to launch an armed slavery insurrection at Harper's Ferry, Virginia on October 16-18, 1859. The failed insurrection gave rise of suspicion among Southerners of a Northern conspiracy to launch slave revolts across the South.

The argument

John Brown, a staunch Northern abolitionist who spent several years fighting for abolition in “Bleeding Kansas,” attempted to launch an armed state-wide slave revolt in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia on October 16-18, 1859. The insurrection attempt failed and ended with Brown executed on December 2nd. As a military operation it changed nothing, and its significance lies entirely in what the two sections of the country made of it afterwards. Public opinion was mixed following the attempted insurrection. A high level of support for Brown emerged from Northern public opinion - support not merely for the abolitionist cause but for a man who had taken up arms in it and been executed for doing so. That reaction told the South something the ordinary political argument had not: that a substantial body of Northern opinion regarded violent action against slavery as legitimate. Southerners, disgusted with Northern sympathy and suspicious of a conspiracy led by the Republican party to launch slave revolts across the South, were deeply concerned that Brown’s failed raid would encourage future slave revolts across the South. The fear was not of Brown, who was dead, but of what his reception implied about how many others might follow and who might be organising them. Read that way, a failed raid became evidence of a settled Northern intention rather than the act of one man. This difference in reaction to Harper's Ferry would increase the ferocity of the slavery debate, since each section took the other's response as confirmation of what it had already suspected, and the dispute over slavery ceased to be one that might be settled politically. It was arguably the real starting point of the war, and what it turned on was slavery.

Premises

[P1]Abolitionist John Brown's failed 1859 armed raid at Harper's Ferry aimed to spark a slave revolt and drew high sympathy in the North. [P2] Southerners, alarmed by that Northern support and fearing further revolts, saw the raid as a Republican conspiracy, sharply intensifying the sectional conflict over slavery. [C] Harper's Ferry inflamed the slavery debate to the point of war, showing that slavery caused the American Civil War.

Counter-arguments

John Brown's failed insurrection was ultimately a large publicity stunt with Brown arguably acting as a terrorist. It was not effective enough to be a cause of the Civil War.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] The stunt did not have this much impact.