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Dr. Ed Ayers 'What Caused The Civil War?'

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Dr. Ed Ayers 'What Caused The Civil War?'
What Caused the Civil War?
Dr. Ed Ayers ideas were that the Civil War was not caused by slavery at all. It was caused by misunderstandings, confusions, and miscalculations of the nation as a whole. He states that the fundamentalists gave the argument of the war starting due to the inevitable conflict between slavery and free labor, while the revisionists emphasize the small events and political structures, rather than just slavery triggering the start of the Civil War. The reasoning that Dr. Ayers argues about the question “what caused the civil war” is that the questions that should be asked to answer this question are a combination of the views of the fundamentalists and the revisionists. His ideas show slavery being an obstacle to the …show more content…
He is not leaning towards the side of the fundamentalists nor the revisionists; he is taking a path straight down the middle, not siding with one or another. He takes the viewpoint of his own, and then describes the two sides and how he agrees with both of their statements, and also, how he disagrees. He uses points for the revisionists like how the political system split the nation into two, by the Democrats and the Republicans, and only those two. It split the nation into voting Union or Confederacy, which sparked the war. He realizes how this can have a major impact on the country splitting, but this was not the only reason Ayers mentions that could have begun the war. After stating this, Dr. Ayers begins to show where he is coming from on the fundamentalist side. The power of slavery very much divided the U.S. into two, with the South wanting to secede to keep an economy that was run by slavery. This is a huge factor of the war, but not the only one. He shows that this is also a factor, but the view of the revisionists cannot be left out. Overall, Dr. Ed Ayers shows that he is neither choosing one side nor another, that many factors helped cause the Civil War. He ends up making a very agreeable and smart decision on the
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