Some events that were key to the start of the Civil War include the Compromise of 1850, which kept the balance between slave and free states and passed a harsher Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise by allowing residents of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves if they wanted to be a slave or free state, and the Election of 1860, when all these matters came to a head with Abraham Lincoln winning the election despite having little to none southern support.
My answer the question "What caused the Civil War" is a definitive cry of "Slavery!" Slavery was the issue that all other major issues stemmed from. Take the Compromise of 1850, for example. The United States was split on whether to allow slavery in new territories gained from Mexico in the Mexican-American War. In September of 1850, the senate passed a series of bills that admitted California as a free state, banned the slave trade (not slavery) in Washington D.C., took Texas's debts in exchange for taking the New Mexico territory away from Texas, established the New Mexico and Utah Territories with popular sovereignty (white male residents could vote on whether to be slave or free), and passed a much harsher Fugitive Slave Law. This series of bills diffused the tension for a few years, but it was a temporary fix.
In 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This act allowed the inhabitants of the Kansas and Nebraska territories to decide if they wanted slavery or not (another instance of popular sovereignty). This angered the North, because it effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise, which banned slavery in states above the 36° 30' line, which Kansas and Nebraska would both be above. The actual text of the Congressional document that created the Nebraska Territory says,
"[The Missouri Compromise] is hereby declared inoperative and void; it being the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States."The idea of popular sovereignty also caused a tide of people to flood into Kansas and Nebraska to vote either for or against slavery. Conflicts were frequent and bloody, and soon Kansas earned the nickname "Bleeding Kansas."
By the time of the Election of 1860, tempers were running high. The Democratic party was split, with Northern Democrats proposing Steven Douglas as their candidate. He was one of the main voices for popular sovereignty and thought that the populations of states should decide on decisive issues. The Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge, a former Vice-President who was pro-slavery, as their presidential nominee. The newly formed Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln as their candidate, who despite being anti-slavery in his personal life, was only against the expansion of slavery on the political stage. A third party, the Constitutional Union Party ran John Bell as their candidate. The Constitutional Union Party wanted to prevent secession of the South and uphold the United States Constitution as originally written, that is, with slavery. When it came time to vote, Abraham Lincoln had such little support in some southern states that he wasn't even on the ballot in nine states. Despite that, he still won the election due to the large amount of northern support. This caused the South to secede from the United States, starting with South Carolina seceding on December 20, about a month and a half after election day. By Abraham Lincoln's inauguration, seven states had already seceded from the United States. Less than three weeks after Lincoln's inauguration, the American Civil War had started with the Confederate States of American bombarding Fort Sumter.
Some people argue that there were different reasons for the start of the Civil War, such as economic differences. I think that while that might be a reason for the Civil War, it still ultimately stemmed from slavery. The South's agricultural society was operated in a very large part by slaves and relied heavily on imports and exports, while the North's industrial economy didn't rely on slaves or inter-continental trade. This caused the North to support and help pass tariffs on imported goods, making imported goods more expensive, which sparked a response of the Nullification Crisis, where South Carolina declared the tariffs unconstitutional and void within South Carolina.
Many Northerners also wanted homesteads available in western territories; land you could get for free if you worked on it. These Northerners didn't want slavery to be allowed in the West, because how could their farms compete with farms that had slave labor doing all the work? As you can see, slavery caused many of the other reasons for the Civil War.
Personally, I can understand some of the frustration the South was going through. Their population, smaller than the North's, led to a lack of votes for President and House of Representatives. Their economy was largely based on farming, which was based on slavery. The focus on agriculture led to a widespread consumption of imported goods, especially from Britain, and then you have Northerners trying to tax imported goods while they make much of what the use and don't rely on imports. Finally, you have the Election of 1860, where a man opposed to slavery, a necessity for your way of life, wins the election despite not even being on your ballot! I would be angry if I was a Southern plantation owner, maybe even angry enough to secede from my country.
I feel like the Civil War had been inevitable for years, but Congress passed acts and compromises that put war off for a few years longer. It seems like a large game of Hot Potato, passing the issue of slavery on to your successors, until time ran out and Lincoln was stuck holding the issue of impending war.
Civil War Trust. Civil War Casualties. http://www.civilwar.org/education/civil-war-casualties.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/
Congress. Public Acts of the Thirty Third Congress of the United States. https://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=010/llsl010.db&recNum=304
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