Historians of the nineteenth-century United States recognize the central role of slavery. References to slavery are so clear and so pervasive in the historical record—secessionists and unionists devoted much of their discussion in the sectional crisis to slavery—that it is not credible to argue that the American Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. However, it is not enough to “just say slavery” (as Apu is instructed in The Simpsons episode excerpted below). A one-word answer cannot begin to capture the origins of the Civil War. Understanding the causes begins with understanding slavery. The institution—and its extraction of the productive and reproductive labors of enslaved human beings—formed the basis of the southern economy. Critics both inside the South, the slaves themselves, and outside, the abolitionists, drew on their revolutionary heritage and new religious ideologies to attack the institution. White southerners and their allies developed a proslavery defense to counter their assaults.
Apu's Citizenship Test: This clip shows Apu's citizenship test in The Simpson's episode "Much Apu About Nothing" (1996). In the episode, the Springfield government raises taxes to pay for a Bear Patrol. Mayor Quimby blames the taxes on illegal immigrants and proposes their deportation. In the clip, Apu--who reveals that he lives in the country illegally--takes the test to become an American citizen.
In the decades leading up to the Civil War, the southern states experienced extraordinary change that would define the region and its role in American history for decades, even centuries, to come. The antebellum South has often been mythologized as economically background. However, between the 1830s and the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, the American South expanded its wealth and population and became an integral part of the national and, indeed, global economy. The South actively engaged new technologies and trade routes while also seeking to assimilate and upgrade its most “traditional” and culturally engrained practices—such as slavery and agricultural production—within a modernizing world. The ideology and practice of slavery profoundly defined and divided the nation, so much so that conflicts over the institution ultimately culminated in the Civil War.