Text 1: Historian Park argues that the Civil War was fundamentally about slavery. Confederate state secession declarations, she notes, repeatedly cite the threat to slavery as their primary grievance. To attribute the war chiefly to "states' rights" or "tariffs," Park contends, is to obscure what Confederate leaders openly proclaimed.
Text 2: Historian Wilcox accepts that slavery was the central cause but argues that ordinary Confederate soldiers, most of whom owned no slaves, fought for a tangle of reasons — defense of home, regional loyalty, distrust of federal authority. Reducing every soldier's motive to slavery, Wilcox contends, oversimplifies the war's social complexity.
The authors most clearly agree that
- A
states' rights was the primary cause of the war.
- B
the war was unrelated to slavery.
- C
every Confederate soldier fought to preserve slavery.
- Dcheck_circle
slavery was the war's central cause at the political level.
Explanation
Both authors agree slavery was central politically; they differ on individual soldier motives. A is shared. B reflects only Park's implication; C and D contradict both.