Simply put, slavery was at the center of the Civil War. While there were other issues at play (the tradition of states' rights, for example), it would be difficult to argue against the claim that by seceding, southerners were attempting to protect the continued survival of slavery into the future. After all, slavery's legal status was explicitly enshrined within the Confederacy's Constitution (as seen in Article 1, Section 9). But the full scope of that problem is far more complicated than a one word answer (“slavery”) would suggest.
Of the three questions asked, it's the third that's perhaps most significant: could this conflict had been avoided? Here we start to think about the larger context which gives rise to secession, and explains more deeply why the Civil War happened at all. The thing to keep in mind here is that secession was not a spur of the moment decision. In fact, an argument could be made that the Civil War culminated from a chain of events which could be traced at least as far back as 1848, with the end of the Mexican War, when the United States acquired territories west to California.
The decade that would follow would be one of heated tension and turmoil, even violence, surrounding slavery's legality in the territories. For both abolitionists and pro-slavery advocates, the stakes were high. Ever since 1787's Northwest Ordinance, there had been the precedence that US territories, upon reaching the minimum population requirements, could formally apply for statehood in the Union. Both abolitionists and slaveholders saw that that the future of slavery would be determined by the territories. Should abolitionists halt the spread of slavery into the territories, one day those territories would become states. Then the Free States would outnumber the Slave States, and could potentially have the majority required to end slavery through Congressional legislation. Likewise, should slavery be established in the territories, the institution would become more secure than ever.
Things would deteriorate quickly when California, thanks to the Gold Rush, reached the population threshold to formally apply for statehood in 1849. In California, slavery was made illegal. In response, Congress became gripped by debate and argument, with South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun threatening secession as early as 1850, whereas Henry Clay of Kentucky and his allies championed the Great Compromise. While Clay's solution passed and California formally joined the United States in 1850, the tensions surrounding slavery would only grow worse from this point forward: from the Great Compromise to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott Decision and the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, all the way to John Brown's 1859 raid at Harper's Ferry. In the end, the final straw came when Abraham Lincoln was elected President, and South Carolina responded by seceding.
Was the Civil War inevitable? That question is almost impossible to answer. What's more important is the recognition that it is difficult (and historically problematic) to separate the act of secession itself from the context that gave rise to it. Secession did not happen in a vacuum; it was the last act in a decade long drama as the question over slavery continually escalated, carrying over from one crisis to the next.
Though both Southern and Northern revisionists tended for many decades after the Civil War to explain its causes in terms of tariffs, states' rights in the abstract, and cultural differences, the direct cause of the war was, in fact, the issue of slavery and Southern fear of the North's interference with the "peculiar institution."
The election of Lincoln as President in 1860 was the immediate catalyst for the secession, first of South Carolina, and then of most of the other states south of the Mason-Dixon line. Lincoln and the Republican party had built their platform around the principle that slavery must not be extended into the territories of the United States. This was, in itself, an anti-slavery position. Revisionists generally asserted that, because Lincoln, himself, and many in his party, did not wish to abolish slavery where it already existed, the cause of the war had nothing to do with slavery. But this argument is a non sequitur. As stated, the planned exclusion of it from the territories was itself a position against slavery. In his speeches, during his debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858 and later, Lincoln had stated again and again that slavery was morally wrong. Moreover, the Southern leadership believed that stopping the spread of slavery would reduce the price of slaves and eventually destroy the institution. In addition, they sensed that even if Lincoln personally didn't wish to abolish slavery where it was already being practiced, others in his administration, in Congress, and among the Northern population in general were in favor of abolition, and that the more compromising position of Lincoln was just a cover for a more radical purpose.
As the secession process took place, the states which had already seceded sent "commissioners" to the other Southern states to urge their legislatures to vote for secession as well. The speeches made by the commissioners focused on the wish to preserve slavery and on their fear that abolition would destroy society and the dominance of the white race. If states' rights were the issue, it was the states' right specifically to preserve slavery that the seceding states wished to defend, not rights in the abstract, or protectionism against tariffs, as was often claimed.
The fact that most Southerners who served did not own slaves, as well as the fact that most Northern soldiers and many leading officers did not wish equality for black people, have often been advanced as reasons that slavery was not at the root of the war. But this argument is a kind of changing-the-subject affair. It confuses cause and effect and ignores what started the war in the first place. Even if Southerners believed they were fighting for the "land" and for "honor," the subtext of their defense of their home states was that they didn't want African Americans to be liberated and to mix freely in society with white people. The Jim Crow laws established after the war prove that this was their thinking.
One cannot see how, in the context of the developments taking place in the world at that time, the conflict could have been avoided. Americans in 1776 had known that a basic contradiction lay at the heart of the newly formed nation. The founders, even those who practiced slavery themselves, knew it was wrong. In the nineteenth-century, technology and the spread of democratic ideals, as well as the ban on the slave trade that went into effect in 1808, were making the oppression of people and the exploitation of labor something shameful and obsolete. Sooner or later an explosion would have to occur, as it did in April, 1861.
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