Cause And Effect Essay: The Cause Of Civil War

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CAUSES OF CIVIL WAR On 12 April 1861, a military unit representing the Confederate States of America, the seven southern states that had seceded from the Union, attacked Fort Sumter. The presence of the Union-controlled post in South Carolina provoked Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, to order strikes. Within two days, the commander stationed at Sumter surrendered. But the assault spurred United States President Abraham Lincoln to rally thousands of troops to crush what he viewed as an insurrection ripening in the South. With that, the Civil War began. "Both sides deprecated war," Lincoln remarked later, "but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.…show more content…
The action was—in large part—a response to the election of Lincoln as president in 1860, a man who seemed to pose a significant threat to the economic and political interests of the slaveholding South. (The Republican candidate received not a single vote in ten southern states.) But Abraham Lincoln never vowed to abolish slavery, which was so vital to the South's agricultural economy and the basis for its political power. In fact, Lincoln stated in his inaugural address—one month before the battle at Fort Sumter—that he would not use his executive power to interfere with the institution in any state where it existed. The president was willing to compromise with southern leadership on these issues, just as northerners in the past had agreed to be conciliatory when sectional tensions arose. Furthermore, Lincoln's term would be four years, a timeframe within which southern Democrats could throw their weight behind a new presidential candidate, one empathetic to the states' economic and political goals.

Lincoln did promise, however, to vigorously oppose the expansion of slavery. Perhaps in retrospect this seems a fairly moderate, or even ambiguous, stance on the existence of the "peculiar institution" in the United States; it is not exactly a
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