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Although over one hundred fifty years have passed since thestart of the American Civil War, that titanic conflict continues tomatter. The forces unleashed by that war were immensely destructivebecause of the significant issues involved: the existence of theUnion, the end of slavery, and the very future of the nation. Thewar remains our most contentious, and our bloodiest, with oversix hundred thousand killed in the course of the four-year struggle. Most civil wars do not spring up overnight, and the AmericanCivil War was no exception. The seeds of the conflict were sownin the earliest days of the republic’s founding, primarily over theexistence of slavery and the slave trade. Although no conflict canbegin without the conscious decisions of those engaged in thedebates at that moment, in the end, there was simply no way topaper over the division of the country into two camps: one thatwas dominated by slavery and the other that sought first to limitits spread and then to abolish it.