Although many people believe that the civil war was only about slavery that is not totally true. The civil war was about many factors and issues that divided the North from the South. The civil war was fought between slave states and free states. For this reason it makes it seem as though it was a slavery war. The civil war created many economic downfalls for both the Union and Confederacy.
Slavery soon became an enormous issue seeing as the slave owners came to treat slaves whichever way they pleased, getting away with it. Northerners did not believe that slavery was correct. In fact, they were anti-slavery, for the North, taking on Abraham Lincoln’s side, thought it should be abolished. Geography played a big role in the secession of the South; in the South the temperature is warmer, there was better soil, and also there were also many more fields and land to grow crops on. For this reason specially, Southerners became further inclined towards slavery, seeing as instead of having the slave-owners doing all the work, they would simply have slaves, without costing them a cent (DOCUMENT # 3).
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.
Oh, and lets not forget the KKK (if that falls into this category; I think it does) who harassed, intimidated, and killed black people. They basically couldn’t escape being tormented. During this period, the south was suffering pretty badly economically. When cotton production slowed significantly during the Civil War, countries that had been deprived of cotton began to grow their own and market prices were cut in half. Banks that loaned to the Confederate government could not collect their debts.
Feminist Perspective: Race Relations Racism towards African Americans and other races have been a struggle to overcome and somewhat continues in our country today. Racism starts far back as the early 1600's. Slavery became the form of labor for the white Americans to produce food, cotton,etc. The slave trade provided a lot of wealth to the white Americans in the United States. African people became enslaved; it seems to me like they did not have the power to fight off the white Americans.
Final Exam African Americans played a huge role in affecting the road to and outcome of the Civil War. Because the south had slaves and the north did not, there was huge controversy over the issue. One of the main reasons for the Civil War was because the north wanted to abolish slavery but the south did not. African Americans were easily targets for slavery because they did not know how to read or right and they had no power over the more dominant white men. Once slaves were in America, they started to realize the magnitude of their problem.
“Most of the Northerners did not doubt that black people were inferior to whites, but they did doubt the benevolence of slavery(civilwar).” Slavery was so cruel that many slaves had to figure out ways to escape it. For example, slaves would destroy farm machinery, fake sick and even commit murder but the most common act of the slaves was to runaway(civilwar). In the 1860s, the Civil War in America was the start of slavery becoming abolished. Slaves in the south escaped and went to the North, where Union generals made abolitionist policies. Many Northern abolitionists became aggressive.
Even northerners who were prejudiced against blacks were often against slavery, because they felt slavery caused unfair competition for free laborers; this argument figured prominently in “Free Soil” ideology. Free Soilers sought to prohibit slavery in the new territories, because it interfered with free labor. Northerners believed that they could work their way up in society by hard work and many did. The most violent confrontations between people who believed in free soil ideology and people who were pro slavery took place in the Kansas territory prior to the start of the Civil War. Kansas became known as Bleeding Kansas as a result of the
During this time, the north underwent major social, economic, and industrial changes known as the Antebellum Period. The south generally clung to cotton and slavery and thus remained essentially the same. However, increasing tensions surrounding slavery ultimately led to the breakdown of the compromise in the middle 19th century. Compromise could not be achieved in this time period due to political complaints and conflicts concerning slavery. In addition the moral and social stance on the issue divided the North and the South and made compromise difficult.
To the south, slavery was not just a business, but a way of life. Southerners usually owned about one to five slaves, but 1% owned over a hundred. The South depended on the slaves to provide cheap labor, to keep production high, and keep the prices of the goods they produce low. Without the slaves they would be forced to pay higher wages and follow government labor regulations then causing higher prices for the average person. The Northerners were opposed to it.