I believe that the Civil War began with the debate over the future of slavery. That very issue led to secession, and secession caused a war where the Northern states fought for the ground of the Union, and the South for their independence as a new confederation of states under its own constitution. It seems to me that any disagreement leads to some form of resentment. We tend to not like what we don’t understand, and it was hard for the North to understand why the Southern states were itching for freedom from them. It seems from a broader point of view that the North has gone through so much just for the Southern states of America to exist.
Assess the factors that led to the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 The main factor that caused the American Civil War in 1861 was slavery as it was the underlying fundamental division between Northern and Southern societies that made living in harmony impossible. However, we must also examine the economic disparity between the North and South, political failure to manage the situation and the impact of the election of Lincoln in 1860. Although slavery is the underlying reason, the civil war would not have happened if it were not for the financial divide that developed because of slavery. These core factors were exacerbated by political mismanagement, a catalyst for the outbreak of the Civil War and Lincoln’s election in 1860, the trigger factor. Despite this, had it not been for slavery, there would have been no initial divide between North and South which created economic disparity and led to Southern paranoia over Northern expansionism which led to war, thus the most important factor.
Because in my perspective, this contradictory proclamation seems to be a political propaganda to support only the whites. Today I stand, as a runaway slave who escaped the grasp of slave owners and harsh Fugitive Slave Laws presented in the Compromise of 1850. However, tension has finally reached a peak between the North and the South due to the secession in 1860. I believe that several key events from 1845-1861 caused all this turmoil and crashed the regional differences between the Union and the Confederacy together. Eventually leading to the outbreak of the Civil war in 1861.
He argues that the value of a human life is freedom in the pursuit of happiness, Henery steward argues that the instition of slavery was wrong and that it is in humane and that Free states provide equal opportunities .However people from the south did not want slavery to end. Unlike the north, southerners had no foreign trade so their only means of economic structure was slavery. In document 81Hilton compares the social and economic conditions of slave owners to those of the poor whites had to work for a living .He also argues that not all people in the south was for slavery it was just the few with property. This idea of freedom and liberty was now being contradicted by the crude acts of slavery because blacks weren’t free but yet there were all these laws that protected the citizens of the United States. The United States was being built on the backbone of slavery but slaves were seen as property, even free blacks weren’t respected at the time because of the fugitive slave act created in the south.
Slavery in Early American Society, a Remembering Many topics of American history raise debate and controversy. From the taking of land from the native to election processes, and even terrorism, most of these can be viewed from many political and moral viewpoints as wrong, necessary, immoral etc… Most of these seem to pale in comparison to the ideology of slavery in our history. Whether thought of in modern society as wrong from a moral perspective, curtailment of human rights, slavery existed for reasons of the time and abolished some time later for other reasons that are surprising to some. From the emergence of written history we see evidence of slavery, in one form or another. The most ancient civilizations--ancient Mesopotamia, Old Kingdom
With the changing of culture and passing of time, the fallout that was (and sometimes still is) hardest to cope with in the United States was racism. As time progressed and things would move from more primitive to more sophisticated design and ideas, slavery did the same. Slavery my have just been the most primitive form of racism, and as it was abolished the idea of another race being subordinate to another didn’t seem to dissipate. Instead it would seem that the “abolitionist movement” became the “civil rights movement”. Instead of the government allowing slavery, it looked like it found a loop hole to not treat people of color equally for anything whether it was sports, school or public facilities blacks were still treated as inferior.
A People’s History of the United States: Reflection Chapter 9 Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom To summarize this chapter, it covers the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation as well as the slaves’ points of view. He explains that in the same way that having slaves grew the economy and advanced technology and society, the freeing of slaves by Abraham Lincoln also was a decision which bettered the American way of life. Zinn explains, “Thus, while the ending of slavery led to a reconstruction of national politics and economics, it was not a radical reconstruction, but a safe one—in fact a profitable one,” (Zinn 172). My reaction is similar to my reaction on the numerous other chapters that cover the subject of slavery. I still stand amazed at the conditions the slaves had to live in and the crowd of politics that surrounded the issue.
With the proposal of the Wilmot Proviso, the precarious balance of free-to-slave states was again being threatened with disruption. The proposal failed, but not before succeeding in creating enough of a stir to contribute to the necessitating of the Compromise of 1850. In this new compromise, which is considered a contributing factor to the delaying of the start of civil war, several new slave policies were enacted. Included in these were the controversial Fugitive Slave Act and the slave trade being abolished in the District of Columbia. While temporarily pacifying a significant number of both Northern and Southerners, the 1850 Compromise also served to widen the ideological gap between
Compared to the relatively easy access of property at the beginning of his life, when Anthony Johnson died, his property was seized by the government because he was considered to be an outsider due to the color of his skin. Thus, as slavery proceeded further in time in the American political and economic system, racism followed. It was not the other way around. Therefore, since it is known that racism was not a direct link to slavery, it must be argued that the only logical cause of racism, then, was a globalization mentality that was held by colonists and the British. The fact that the Spanish, the main competitors of the British, were
Years of frustration is what caused the eventual succession. Since the American Revolution, the topic of slavery was present in the minds of important men in both northern and southern states. The institution of slavery was allowed to continue in the United States, but it was when the Union started to expand that much of the frustration began. The government had passed regulations banning the spread of slavery into these new territories, and many southern states were outraged to the point where South Carolina threatened to succeed from the Union in 1821. Southern states believed that their way of life was being infringed, meaning that slavery was an important institution for their mainly agricultural based economy.