Brooks Simpson over at Crossroads has just posted an excerpt from U.S. Grant’s Memoirs, in which Grant discusses what he saw as the causes of the Civil War. From the excerpt Simpson provides, it is clear that Grant believed that slavery in the South was increasingly incompatible with the modernizing society of the North, and when white Southerners after Abraham Lincoln’s election believed they could no longer control the national government sufficiently to defend the institution of slavery they seceded from the Union which brought on the Civil War. To read the Grant excerpt over at Crossroads, <click here>.
In short, U.S. Grant believed slavery to be the principal cause of the Civil War, along with economic modernization in the North.
