No event affected the United States and its people more significantly than the Secession (leaving the United States and forming their own government) of eleven Southern states and the Civil War that followed. Four years of bloody warfare, over one-half million deaths, untold misery and destruction, and long-lasting racial and sectional hatreds resulted. Even today, one and a half centuries later, America is still marked—politically, economically, and socially—by these awful events.Americans who witnessed the secession of the Southern states, and historians ever since, have argued over the causes. Why, after eighty-five years of unity and commonnationhood, did the United States break apart? Were the differences between North and South so great that unity was no longer possible? Or was secession an accident, the result of mistakes, political misjudgments, and passions that overwhelmed reasonable compromise? What parts did slavery, the debate over its expansion into the territories, and the rancorous conflict of its supporters and opponents play in bringing on secession?
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