The American Civil War

[Chewbaccus]

The general trend of any history class - as I've seen - is that you get the simple answer early on (The Civil War was about slavery), and then as you get older, the gray starts to come in (differing economic structures, social movements, international reactions, etc). From there comes the arguments.

I've always held on to an argument I came across in my junior year of high school - that the Proclamation was issued to make the war about slavery in order to use moral superiority to forestall any English or French intercession - military and/or otherwise - on the Southern side. To wit: post-Proclamation, as much as the English and French may have wanted to check the development of America as an economic rival, they could not rouse their populace to fight on behalf of (what was then perceived to be) the continuance of slavery.