ABSTRACT
Changing fashions in the interpretation of the causes of the Civil War have naturally reflected the times through which successive generations of historians have lived. In its crudest form, the Marxist interpretation of the civil war depicts a struggle between capitalism and feudalism in which the former inevitably triumphed. The economic explanation of the coming of the Civil War often leans heavily on the unproved assumption that economic self-interest is somehow more real and basic than ideas, emotions, moral commitments, prejudices, political loyalties or social frustrations. In the pre-Civil War years there was little indication that slavery would be moderated or reformed, let alone abolished, from within the South itself. Slaves were to be freed as a means towards the end of saving the Union, and, after all, several slave states in the borderland had been kept on the Northern side from the start of the war.
