To What Degree Did the Civil War Result from the Political, Economic, Cultural, and Moral Issues Posed by the Institution of Slavery?

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Paper #2 To what degree did the Civil War result from the political, economic, cultural, and moral issues posed by the institution of slavery? Some people simply answer that it was a fight against slavery. While slavery did have an important part to play in the lead up to the Civil War, there were other causes that fed the fight between North and South that finally erupted into secession and Civil War with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. First of all, there were economic and social differences between the North and the South; with the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, cotton became very profitable. This machine was able to reduce the time it took to separate seeds from the cotton, and, at the same time, allowed the increase in the number of plantations of other crops than cotton. Furthermore, cotton needed a greater need of cheap labor, in other words, slaves. Thus, the southern economy became a crop economy, depending on cotton and therefore on slavery. On the other hand, the northern economy was based more on industry than agriculture. The South was based on the plantation system while the North was focused on city life. This change in the North meant that society evolved as peoples of different cultures and classes had to work together. On the other hand, the South continued to hold onto an old social order. As America began to expand, first with the lands gained from the Louisiana Purchase and later with the Mexican War, the question of whether new states admitted to the union would be Free states or not arose. The Missouri Compromise passed in 1820 contained a rule that prohibited slavery in states from the former Louisiana Purchase the latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes north except in Missouri. The Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state and ended the Slave Trade in the District of Columbia. One of the issues was the Fugitive
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