What is the consensus of real, modern historians about the cause of the civil war?

Opinions are like noses, everyone has one.  Informed opinions based on real research by lots of real historians, i.e., an examination of real facts, should be the basis of opinions.

What Twenty-First-Century Historians Have Said about the Causes of Disunion: A Civil War Sesquicentennial Review of the Recent Literature

Michael E. Woods

Michael E. Woods

Michael E. Woods received his Ph.D. in May 2012 from the University of South Carolina, where he is now a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History.

Journal of American History, Volume 99, Issue 2, 1 September 2012, Pages 415–439, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jas272

Published:

01 September 2012

Professional historians can be an argumentative lot, but by the dawn of the twenty-first century, a broad consensus regarding Civil War causation clearly reigned. Few mainstream scholars would deny that Abraham Lincoln got it right in his second inaugural address—that slavery was “somehow” the cause of the war. Public statements by preeminent historians reaffirmed that slavery's centrality had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Writing for the popular rCivil War magazine North and South in November 2000, James M. McPherson pointed out that during the war, “few people in either North or South would have dissented” from Lincoln's slavery-oriented account of the war's origins. In ten remarkably efficient pages, McPherson dismantled arguments that the war was fought over tariffs, states' rights, or the abstract principle of secession. That same year, Charles Joyner penned a report on Civil War causation for release at a Columbia, South Carolina, press conference at the peak of the Palmetto State's Confederate flag debate. Endorsed by dozens of scholars and later published in Callaloo, it concluded that the “historical record … clearly shows that the cause for which the South seceded and fought a devastating war was slavery.”¹