[quote] While many still debate the ultimate causes of the Civil War, Pulitzer Prize-winning author James McPherson writes that, "The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become ... [/quote] Tis true it was about slavery, but not about slaves paradoxically enough, many southerners will claim that the Civil War was about the rights of individual states to self govern. But in the end the breaking point was self governance that involved slavery. It was not until after the war started that the focus shifted from the practice of slavery to the slaves themselves. I am a southerner, I have pride in my state, and the history of my land, but I think that slavery was an absolutely terrible thing, and I will never understand why in a country where we constantly expressed the merits of freedom we somehow also tried to claim that we owned people.