The Daily Kos has the article Head of Dept. of History at West Point destroys argument that Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery. It features the YouTube video Was the Civil War About Slavery?

The evidence is clear and overwhelming. Slavery was, by a wide margin, the single most important cause of the Civil War — for both sides. Before the presidential election of 1860, a South Carolina newspaper warned that the issue before the country was, “the extinction of slavery,” and called on all who were not prepared to, “surrender the institution,” to act. Shortly after Abraham Lincoln’s victory, they did.

Note the meaning of peculiar institution as implied by the video. It doesn’t mean odd institution. It means an institution only found in the southern states.