I'm absolutely immersed in a Yale online course at the moment on the American civil war.
I keep running into a few questions where I start to wonder about things like inevitability and contingency.
I'll hang my question on this example. We're told (by this historian) that the civil war absolutely was really about slavery. Then ... in another lecture, we are told that the most random set of coincidences play a part in the coming of the war, in this case, a depression in 1857.
So my question is, in this particular example, was the civil war therefore "inevitable" so long as slavery occurred? Were the contingencies just a timing issue? Is that the right way to understand contingencies?
Similarly with inevitability of the great conflagration in 1914, vs the contingency of Gavrilo Prinzip.
So, I'm not looking for the actual answer for the civil war, more just some kind of framework to think about these things. Any guidance on a framework (and any good lectures online, if you know any) would be very helpful.
EDIT: "Framework" = How historians think about / approach these things.
So, what you are really coming up against is the debate between determinism/fatalism and the idea that human actors play a more central through exercising agency. This is more of a philosophical question than anything else, and is an ongoing debate in the social sciences and other arts fields. This particular question is a bit loaded, since 'what-ifs' are not strictly speaking allowed here, but you may consider rewording it to talk more about the debate outlined above if you are really interested.
However, analyzing the Civil War, and the 'contingencies' you are referring to; we can't really know if the war would occur had everything not leading up to it not occurred. That is the realm of fiction, not history. However, thinking of the events leading up to the war as requirements for it to happen rather than inevitable stepping stones is generally how someone who believes more in human agency would frame this issue. Even if one is a subscriber in determinism (I am not), you still have to account for that final choice that an individual or individuals made.
If you're interested in the determinism debate, just do a quick google search on that, or fatalism, in history. There are loads of books written by various people. Some of the most prominent critiques of determinism are found in book reviews in academic journals of history books that employ it.