In 1951, historian Pete Geyl wrote: The quarrel which broke up the Union in 1861-1865 was about
slavery. It had been gathering strength for a long time and at last erupted with elemental violence.
The North and South, divided by a moral issue of the first magnitude, the one detesting slavery, the
other glorifying it as the basis of its social system, were unable to understand each other, and the
Civil War came as an inevitable result.
Write a thesis-driven essay arguing for or against this central question: Was the Civil War
inevitable?
