Between 1790 and 1861, the year in which the Civil War began, plantation agriculture expanded, therefore, the demand for slaves increased. At that time, almost one third of all Southern families owned slaves -fifty percent in South Carolina and Mississippi alone- bringing the total number of southern slave owners to an estimated 385,000. The Southern economy was almost completely reliant upon slavery and the slave trade. To advance this agricultural wealth, money was invested back into slavery. Needless to say, southern slave owners were not willing to abolish slavery because of the money they stood to lose.
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.
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.
The cotton gin did not only change the output of cotton in the south it also changed the whole entire country. It expanded slavery, created sectional conflict, fueled the American Industrial Revolution, and it also led to the America’s bloodiest war: The American Civil War. By Early 19th century cotton became King in United States, and slave labor was in critical demand. By 1790 slavery was a declining institution, in 1790 there are only about seven hundred thousands of slaves in United States, but in 1860 right before the out break of the American Civil War there are approximate four million slaves in United States. (Boyer et al.
In the book Half Slave and Half Free, Bruce Levine introduces the various issues that arose during the antebellum era in America that fueled the onset of the Civil War. According to Levine, tension due to conflicting interests between the slave based economy of the South and the free labor economy of the North boiled up to a point that led the newly formed nation to war. Levine starts off by giving a brief history of slavery and then shifts to discussing the way in which it revolutionized the economy of America and the role that it played in the conflicts leading to the Civil War. Slavery was crucial to the southern states as they depended on it to run their plantations, whereas, the northern states abolished slavery as they adopted the idea that “each person works for himself” (46). “The distinctive ways in which North and South organized their labor systems left their mark on all aspects of regional life - including family, gender and leisure patterns and both religious and secular ideologies.
What Lead to the Civil War. From the beginning of the United States, war was inevitable between the North and the South, over the issues of slavery. Ever since Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gins in 1790, the South has been on a completely different economic path from the North. In the 1850’s political developments, the Fugitive slave act, the Dread Scott decision, and the John Brown raid, eventually all drove the regions further and further apart. Even though the North and South tried to reconcile their differences on the issue of slavery by implementing compromises in the 1820’s and 1850’s, both attempts failed, leading up to the Civil War.
Cotton is the next thing plantation owners turn to after the failure of indigo and tobacco. The plantation owners strike a goldmine after Eli Whitney introduces the cotton gin to the South region. The cotton era is born and with it comes the explosion and need to have even more slaves. Slaves are now needed to clear the land, work the cotton crop in the fields and to harvest the cotton once it has completed full growth. Mississippi was admitted as a slave state to the union because of the intense profitability of cotton and the use of slaves.
However, it is evident that Fidel would not have been as successful in conducting the revolution if it wasn’t for the underlying long term social and economic problems which essentially paved the way for revolution. Relations between the U.S and Cuba was one of the underlying economic problems affecting Cuba. Following the Spanish-American War of 1895, the United States emerged as both Cuba’s protector and primary trade partner. By the mid 1950’s American business interests controlled about 40 percent of Cuba’s sugar production and over 90 percent of Cuba’s utilities, such as electricity and communications. Ties between Cuba and America brought obvious prosperity to a limited segment of Cuba’s population though they did so at the expense of Cuba’s national potential and economic independence.
African slave labor became vital to Saint-Domingue’s economic development; one of the primary reasons that Haiti was such a productively rich land was because of slave labor. Under French colonial rule, nearly 800,000 slaves arrived from Africa, accounting for a third of the entire Atlantic slave trade between 1783 and 1791; many died from disease and the harsh conditions of the sugar and coffee plantations. Statistics show that there was a complete turnover in the slave population every 20 years. This huge slave population was ruled by a white population that by 1789, despite the short life expectancy
Whitney’s cotton gin made cotton production enormously profitable and created an ever-increasing demand for slave labor. By 1860, cotton had exploded across the South and clearly dominated the Southern agricultural economy. As a result of more cotton being planted, more labor was needed. In order to keep up with laborious demand, Southern planters transported hundreds of thousands of African-American slaves westward into the new cotton lands of the lower Mississippi valley and Gulf Coast states, where the planters used their social, political, and economic power to keep slavery legal. The South’s dependence on cotton production tied it economically to the plantation system and racially to white supremacy.