the civil war

     It's popular now to say that the Civil war wasn't really about slavery, and that's true, in a way. The Civil War was about who was going to run the country. The South, because of the 3/5 Compromise ( see related blog article ), had representation in Congress out of proportion to the number of its citizens. The South was used to pretty much having its way in Congress, if not in the Senate.Although not always a majority, Southern representatives were more likely to vote with one another than Northerners were.
      In the decades before the Civil War, the number of Senators from slave-holding states and from free states was equal. The South was determined to preserve this balance. New territories in the West were applying for statehood. Admission of even one free state would have meant that the South would be outnumbered in the Senate. Each application for statehood became a political crisis. Northerners who never managed to abolish slavery were determined not to permit it to spread to the West. Southerners would have lost most of their political clout if they became greatly outnumbered in Congress by Northerners. Once they became a large majority, the Northerners might move to abolish slavery--and they might win. Another way to keep the North from becoming a majority was to oppose immigration, since most immigrants, then and now, came to the North.
    So you can see how the Civil War was, and wasn't about slavery.