what were the root causes of the civil war
Origins of the American Civil War 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."[4] 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."[5] Other important factors were partisan politics, abolitionism, nullification vs secession, Southern nationalism, Northern nationalism, expansionism, economics and modernization in the Antebellum period.