Well, I did make the point that there would have been a civil war with or without slavery, because the South was losing their economic and political sovereingty to the more populous and industrialized North...so that was the root cause, I would think.

The slavery issue was another contributing cause, and a very thorny one, that inflamed people's emotions far more than the economic and political issues, so it cannot be dismissed as a cause of the war, but not necessarily THE cause.

Then there is state's rights...a very issue leading to that war.

People have the right to divorce, so why should a state not have the right to secede?

Obviously, everyone has made useful points in this discussion. For each one of us the crucial cause in the above will seem to be the one which happens to push our particular emotional buttons the most...and that depends on our upbringing, what we've been exposed to, the "filter of our perceptions", to quote from another thread (women's causes in music...or something like that).

Hey folks, we're all subjective to an extent, and every one of those causes played a part in bringing about that war. That's life.