The most contributing factor to the coming of the Civil War was slavery, an economic issue to the South and a moral issue to the North. Slavery was the driving force for the Southern slave states to leave the Union. The Civil War was ultimately caused by the secession of the Southern states from the Union.
             Slavery had caused a great division in our country by the 1850's. The abolitionists of the North proclaimed that slavery was immoral and wrong, and the Southern "fire eaters" were dependent upon slave labor to run its large plantations where the "cash crop" of the South, cotton, was grown. The South, being predominantly agricultural, needed these slaves as workers in the fields of their plantations.
             The North, on the other hand, was heading more and more towards manufacturing. They were less dependent on slavery as many of the workers in the factories were immigrants. Because of the factory atmosphere, many of the immigrants settled in the large cities on the North where jobs were easier to find.
             Citizens of the South believed that slaves were better off than the immigrants because their owner took care of their basic needs. Southerners often tried to show the plantation life of a slave as a family atmosphere. They said that "Immigrants were underpaid and over worked" and "often working conditions were unsafe and unhealthy."
             States rights also played a role in the start of the Civil War. The first state to secede from the Union was South Carolina. In their declaration of secession they stated that they were leaving the Union on two defining factors: "the right of a State to govern itself; and the right of a people to abolish a Government when it becomes destructive of the ends for which it was instituted." Southerners believed that it should be up to the state to become a free or slave state and that the federal government should make no bill having to do with slavery. South Carolina is quoted as saying ...