The Civil War is believed by most to be caused because of the issue of slavery. Some, however, believe that it was actually about states' rights, or the rights of states to govern themselves outside of the control of the federal government. Whenever states' rights arguments are made, they all eventually come back to slavery. States' rights were simply a convenient political debate to fit the slavery argument into.

The American Civil War was, ultimately, about one thing: slavery. However, other issues found their way into the debate as well. Arguably the most significant of these was the issue of states' rights. The idea of states' rights, at its most basic level, is the idea that the states that make up the United States of America should have individual rights to work as their own independent governments beyond the control of the national government. For example, while most states in the U.S. have a minimum driving age of sixteen years, it is actually up to each individual state to decide. In South Dakota, for instance, the driving age is actually fourteen. This is generally believed to be due to the large farming population that requires the help of young teens on family farms, often requiring that these teens drive trucks or tractors to tend to crops and livestock, but there is no legislative evidence for this belief. In New Jersey, the minimum driving age is seventeen, the highest in the country. There have been efforts in the past decades to impose a national law for the driving similar to the national drinking age in 1985, but these efforts have not been successful as of 2017.

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