In 1619, a ship called the White Lion docked at Point Comfort (what is known as Virginia today) carrying about 20 black people. These would be the first negro slaves that the North American region would see. This event would also be directly and indirectly tied to the #Civil War, undoubtedly the bloodiest conflict that the nation has recorded to date.

However, one thing that naturally draws a lot of curiosity is the actual cause of this war.

Sure, the negro slaves were central to this conflict. But was this war fought over the moral issue of slavery?

The simple answer to this is, “No.” The sparks that triggered this bloodshed were more political and economic than they were moral.

The biggest proof of this rests in the fact that even though the North was vehemently against the slavery practices of the South, this didn’t mean that they held any real regard for the slaves themselves. If anything, they still discriminated (heavily) against the blacks and, by and large, treated these individuals like they weren’t human in most cases.

Even the White Southerners who decided to secede did so fundamentally because they believed that their right to hold slaves was under direct threat by the Union. They felt that slavery, something that had become at that time quite central to their livelihood, had come under threat and so decided to take action.

Let’s backtrack a little here so we can get some context.

From the time that the first groups of slaves landed, this practice had become very popular in the country. It had become embraced so widely that, by 1775, there was no part of the country where slavery wasn’t legal.

However, the difference of opinion on the issue of slavery started to present itself in the 19th century. It was during this time that the North and the South slowly decided to start choosing their economic trajectory. The former decided to shift towards technology and manufacturing. This in turn meant that there was significantly less need for slavery in the vast majority of their operations. On the other hand, the latter opted to focus more on plantation agriculture, something that heavily relied on slave labor at the time.

To put it simply, the North was running on white labor while the South was running on black labor. If nothing else, this was what made it so easy for abolitionism to spread like wildfire in the North, especially in the 1850s.

Because one group clearly needed slaves more than the other, the level to which this resource was prioritized varied significantly between these two factions, and the gap that this created continued to grow. So much so that noteworthy attempts by the United States government to bridge the chasm such as the Missouri Compromise and Compromise of 1850 did little next to nothing to appease either side.

It is important to remember that during all of this time, black people in the North were still subject to random and incessant acts of violence. Churches were burned, their homes were looted and no small number of black people lost their lives during this time.

Take a quick moment to ask yourself this; if this war was about the morality of slavery, wouldn’t the side fighting to abolish the practice be at least kinder to the race they’re supposedly defending?

But let’s get back on topic.

The South, on the whole, became even more determined to spread slavery even further beyond their regions as they saw that it would ultimately decline and die if this wasn’t done. The birth of the Republican Party, an explicitly anti-slavery political group presented a clear obstacle to this mission.

And, when the candidate of this party in the person of Abraham Lincoln emerged victorious in the 1860 presidential election without a single vote from the South, the region heard the sound of the first death knell of their political authority.

So, they did the one thing that they believed they could – attempt secession before the last of their political authority waned. As the head of the union, #President Lincoln wasn’t about to let this happen. But even at that, he still tried to avoid conflict.

Things turned physical not when the treatment of slaves by the South got worse but when the South opted to attack Fort Sumter, a military base of the United States in an ill-conceived act of dominance.

From there, matters would escalate quickly until, in the end, nearly two percent of the entire population of the country would lose their lives to the conflict.

In the end, the truth is that all evidence points to the fact that arguably the bloodiest event in American history was primarily politically and economically motivated. Morals only came in afterward to put a nice face on things.