Hi! As you might imagine American History is actually quite popular on Reddit and we have a pretty extensive faq on the subject.

As for the start of it all the most comprehensive question already answered about your question is likely this one and it would be the first one I check out. A second, also very well written post is this one which discusses the aft argued subject of 'states rights vs slavery'. Here is another thread which is also filled with the first poster I linked. I particularly like this summary in the thread:

When people say that Lincoln fought to free the slaves, or that the war was fought purely over slavery, that is wrong and/or an oversimplification. When people say that slavery caused the Civil War, however, that is completely correct. All the major points of sectional tension, whether social, political, economic, etc, that were significant enough to drive the nation apart can be traced definitively back to slavery and its respective presence/absence. However, people went to war in 1861 primarily because of their desire to either preserve the Union or enforce secession.

Slavery intersects in the South in the war because it was their primary motivation for seceding. States' Rights rhetoric was by and large a mechanism for preserving slavery rather than the primary concept/institution for which they fought. The South had been all too happy to abandon the sanctity to states' rights when it suited them in the past.

Ultimately you're going to be hard pressed to find a non-slavery focused analysis of the leadup to the war as American culture is basically centered around that issue. It's the question people ask, it's the most common misconception about the wars beginning, it was the hotbutton issue at the time, and most of the seceding States cited protecting the institution of slavery as their primary cause for secession and ultimately war. So 'states rights' and 'slavery' are pretty much everyone ever talks about w.r.t. the American Civil War.

If you don't get a question for 'what were the consequences of it all' you could resubmit later asking about it with the name in which we give its aftermath, the 'Reconstruction Era' (1865-1877). This should also, in general, act as a keyword for you to do some other internet research about the topic hopefully as the consequences of this war are, to be frank, very well written about all over the place!

Could some answer this follow up. One of my high school teachers once said something like "In high school you learn that it start over slavery. In college you learn it was actually about more than that. Then in graduate school you learn it was actually about slavery." Is this accurate?