What caused the Civil War: Rhodes and the Beards

“If any one is inclined to doubt that there was other than a single cause for secession and the war that ensued; if he feel himself almost persuaded by the earnest and pathetic statements of Southern writers since the war, who naturally have sought to place the four years' devotion and heroism of the South on a higher basis than that of a mighty effort to conserve an institution condemned alike by Christianity and by ethics, let him read the speeches and the newspaper articles of the early days of the secession movement in South Carolina. It cannot be denied that the South Carolinians looked the matter squarely in the face, and that sincerity characterized their utterances.”

[Pathetic: here, emotionally moving. The “institution” is slavery.]

“[T]he armed conflict had been only one phase of the cataclysm, a transitory phase; . . . at bottom the so-called Civil War, or the War between the States, in the light of Roman analogy, was a social war, ending in the unquestioned establishment of a new power in the government, making vast changes in the arrangement of classes, in the accumulation and distribution of wealth, in the course of industrial development, and in the Constitution inherited from the Fathers. Merely by the accidents of climate, soil, and geography was it a sectional struggle. . . .

“[A]ccuracy compels us to characterize by the same term [revolution] the social cataclysm in which the capitalists, laborers, and farmers of the North and West drove from power in the national government the planting aristocracy of the South.”