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Sumner's tax was a wartime proposal, and never enacted. No other tax on slavery had existed, unless you go back in the War of 1812 period. So a tax on slavery couldn't have caused the Civil War.
The main cause of the Civil War was the South came to hate and fear the North, and the North (to a lesser degree, but enough) hated the South. The bottom psychological problem was the South's hatred and fear of the slaves. They knew of the case of Haiti, where the white French settlers had been slaughtered by the slaves. They knew of Nat Turner's rebellion, which accomplished the same thing here, on a very small scale, before it was crushed. For the South, Nat Turner had impact comparable to the 9/11 terrorist attack, confirming fears and extinguishing all popular sympathy for the idea of freeing slaves. Then came the rise of the Northern Abolitionist Movement, with it's bitter moral accusations being seen, in the light of Nat Turner, as maddening insults, and indeed, as a call for their destruction. This view was ultimately, explicitly confirmed by John Brown. After that, there could be no thought of accepting a Republican president. Lincoln's moderation was seen as a sham; secession was seen as a refuge of safety, a wonderful relief form a deadly threat, and a final and satisfying rebuke to a deadly foe. One might capture the feeling of the thing by imagining one's feeling on divorcing an abusive and hated spouse.
The North was in no mood by that time to put up with such a rebuke. Lincoln, had he known of the level of bloodshed that would have resulted, might have tried to head off war. But in the event, he was assured of quick victory, and had no basis to doubt it. Failure to fight, on the other hand, would have left him politically scorned and ruined. And so the war came.
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