Issues That Caused the American Civil War Dbq

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There were four basic issues that caused the Civil War in America; these issues included social and economic differences between the North and the South, states’ rights versus the federal government, the fight between supporters of slavery and abolitionists, and the growth of the abolition movement. Social and economic aspects were monumental in causing the Civil War. In Document E peaceable secession is discussed by Daniel Webster. Due to the social disagreements between the North and the South, secession became a major issue. The social aspects that caused the Civil War were that the North progressed towards being concentrated on urban life and the South was absorbed in the plantation structure of society. This led to the South’s need for slaves and the North’s lack thereof. In Document M, President Buchanan discusses the other side of Daniel Webster’s argument by saying that the South should have the ability to secede in order to retain slavery. Both of these documents support the idea that social aspects led to the Civil War through disagreements between the North and the South. When the cotton gin was invented in 1793, cotton came to be very lucrative. This machine had the ability to decrease the time taken to separate seeds from the cotton. However, with the number of the plantations willing to change from growing other crops to cotton increasing, there was a greater need for a large amount of cheap labor which was achieved through slavery. This resulted in the Southern economy developing a one crop economy, which depended on cotton and consequently on slavery. In contrast to the South, the Northern economy was centered more on manufacturing than farming. The change in the Northern economy caused society to evolve because people of different cultures and classes were required to work together. All of these aspects came together to create vastly different
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