Was slavery the only reason of the war?

YES or NO.

Without slavery and the turmoil that it brought to inter-state relations there would have been no war...

Read "Apostles of Disunion." Makes it pretty plain where the secessionists' heads were.

I voted yes because I firmly believe slavery was the root cause of the issue, were there other issues of dispute, absolutely. But first and foremost, in my opinion, was the fear that a Republican in the White House would degrade the political power of the slaveocracy. The political ugliness between parties had been around too long, much as today when you see some Republicans & Democrats at each others throats you could ask them why the intense vitriol; and neither side could likely tell you.

It isn't ridiculous. We have members who firmly believe that. It's what keeps discussions exciting.

The other reasons were not enough to cause a war....Slavery was the poison in the kool-aid...Why didn't any free states seceed based on these other reasons? All the other reasons were minor inter state irratations that were blown out of proportion by the presence of slavery in the argument..Suddenly small arguments explode because one side thinks the other is trying to intefer with slavery or its right to keep slavery out of its borders, and both sides are blinded by this and cant see just how small the original argument was...

When you examine the reasons they give for secession, everyone of them aside from tariffs, has slavery as its root cause for being there..ie Expansion into territories, hinderance of the FSL, John Browns raid, abolitionist behavior..The root cause of all these is slavery.. If slavery didn't exist, none of these reasons for secession would have existed either and the war would not have come about..There certainly would have been future arguments between states and the Federal government, but there was nothing so dire as to cause a war..

Well said, Will. If there were other reasons, they were not enough over which to go to war.

But that's like saying that Mrs. O'Leary's cow was the only reason for the Chicago fire. True, the cow kicked over the lantern, but there had to be a lantern, and hay, and the right wind conditions, and yada, yada, yada....

Now imagine a scenario where the Founding Fathers had included in the Constitution an article on secession, stating explicitly its legality, one way or the other, and, if legal, spelling out a detailed procedure to accomplish it. Would war have occurred? Probably not. So while I agree that slavery was the only contemporary political issue, and was the biggest cause, it was not the only cause.

Interesting. I never knew that.