answers: conflicts over slavery
context: relentless expansion of market relations and commercial agriculture. Alabamians were thus, he judged, prepared to believe the worst once Lincoln was elected. The politicians of the 1850s were acting in a society in which the traditional restraints that suppressed sectional conflict in the 1820s and 1850s– the most important of which being the stability of the two-party system– were being eroded as this rapid extension of democracy went forward in the North and South. It was an era when the mass political party galvanized voter participation to 80% or 90% turnout rates, and a time in which politics formed an </s> South Carolina. 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." 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 </s> Proclamation: On March 4, 1865, Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural Address that slavery was the cause of the War: Origins of the American Civil War Historians debating the origins of the American Civil War focus on the reasons why seven Southern states declared their secession from the United States (the Union), why they united to form the Confederate States of America (simply known as the "Confederacy"), and why the North refused to let them go. While most historians agree that conflicts over slavery caused the war, they disagree sharply regarding which kinds of conflict—ideological, economic, political, or social—were most
question: what was the main reason for the civil war