Only 8% of high school seniors said the South seceded because of slavery; 48% "tax" [View all]

[muriel_volestrangler]

In early December 2016, Teaching Tolerance contracted with Survey USA, a highly rated national polling firm to conduct an online survey of 1,000 American high school seniors.
...
The most shocking finding of this survey is that only 8 percent of high school seniors can identify slavery as the cause of the Civil War. Almost half of the respondents (48 percent) said tax protests were the cause; it is possible that they confused the Civil War with the Revolutionary War, but that is its own particular problem, given that all of the other questions in the survey were about slavery in some form. That gap shows just how resistant students are to identifying slavery as the central cause of the Civil War.

https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/tt_hard_history_american_slavery.pdf

Question was:

17. Which was the reason the South seceded from the Union?
a. To preserve states’ rights
b. To preserve slavery
c. To protest taxes on imported goods
d. To avoid rapid industrialization
e. Not sure

"Not sure" was 13%. So that's about 31% for the combined "states' rights" and "industrialization" answers, so even the "slavery? Who, us??? Nah, it was states' rights" apologists justification lost out to the "I guess it was tax" ignorance.