Hi, to all! This week, one of our Civil War re-enactors who does programs for us stopped by my office. I asked him to tell me (in 30 words or less) what, in his study and in the discussions of the Civil War Roundtable (meets in the Kansas City area monthly) were the top reasons for the Civil War--and to rank them. He said there, were, actually three/four, that the issue of States Rights was held higher than that of the issue of Slavery--but that, in itself, was tangled up with the issues of Immigration and Religion. That was something that intrigued me--and, sure enough, as I have been looking at that issue, I'm finding all sorts of information to verify it. Basically--the thinking on this issue is that, in particular, the 20 years or so before the Civil War were ones in the North of high immigration of Germans, in particular. They were, basically, fleeing very much a life of servitude, where they felt that they had barely escaped a life so similar to that of slavery that there was a great dislike for it (he said--most of this is being just touched on in what I'm now reading--stuff like the Encyclopedia of the Civil War Society...) and, those in the South were the 'old' Americans--even though most of them did not own slaves, they liked their agrarian lifestyle--liked their sense of history and the sense that they had control over their little domain(s). They did not like change and they did not like the fact that not only were there these new immigrants coming into THEIR country--but they were of a strange religion--most were Lutherans and that, also, was very different and not liked. I'm not finding too much, so far, to go very deep in that--but there are huge numbers of German-American immigrants who joined the Union Army--and even though there was still immigration occurring during the war, it would only take a few months of being here before the males who had arrived from Germany felt that it was not just a way to give back to this country, but they were very happy to fight against slavery. He tied all of that up to show how it had such an impact on why and how the Southern states felt that they could secede from the Union--and how the issue of slavery was one which they felt that they had the right to decide on their own--they didn't want these new people who (they felt) were influencing those in the North, changing a perfectly good lifestyle, losing their sense of culture and history to be who was telling them what to do. Thus, we had somewhat of what we do now--change. Immigrants taking over and changing the viewpoints, the way(s) of life--and the reaction to that I'd not really looked, ever, at the issue of immigration/who was coming at the time both in the years leading up to the Civil War and then during it. It's a bit late to be sharing in this thread, but I thought it might be interesting to others and had not seen it discussed in the previous set of posts on the topic. He also stated that if you don't see/understand some of those pieces, you won't understand a lot of what is happening even today...and so that is something I'm trying to see, too. Best, Marlena in Missouri