What caused the Civil War between the North and the South?
The Great Split
What caused the Civil War between the North and the South?
Once upon a time — actually, in the 1860s — the United States got into the biggest argument in its whole history. It was so big that it split the country in two, North against South. People still ask: what could one country possibly disagree about THAT much? Let's untangle it.
At the heart of it all was a terrible thing called slavery. In the Southern states, millions of Black people were held as slaves — forced to work without freedom, without pay, treated as property instead of people. The North had mostly ended slavery. The South had not. That difference is the seed everything else grew from.
