Explain The Trends That Led To The Civil War

1552 Words7 Pages
Trends That Led to the Civil War By the year 1861, a nation that once began with “We the people” had been rent apart into two warring principalities, no longer united by their heritage. American citizens, who had once been united in fighting for their independence, found themselves bearing arms against each other. Less than a century after its inception, the United States of America was being split asunder by civil war. So it must be asked, how did such a crisis come about? This question has been the basis of many historians’ works over the years. What caused antebellum era sectionalism—the division of the United States into Northern and Southern factions based on a divergence between northern and southern beliefs and interests—to develop to the point of civil war? Although opinions differ as to exactly which cause was the most significant, it is safe to say that the Civil War had many considerable causes. And as is common with causes of other wars, the events which led to sectional conflict and then to war can be seen grouped together as a series of major trends that shaped the American nation between the signing of the Constitution in 1787 and the attack on Fort Sumter in 1861. These trends had their origins in territorial expansion, industrialization, and slavery, and together they gradually destroyed unity between the North and the South by generating distrust, creating a sense of inequality, and shattering the hope of peaceful coexistence. Even from the beginning, there were signs of brewing discontent over…show more content…
The American Civil War was the culmination not of so many isolated events but of the much broader trends that those events reveal. From the signing of the Constitution in 1787 to the attack on Fort Sumter in 1861, territorial expansion, industrialization, and most importantly slavery generated the increasing sectional conflict which led to the outbreak of
Open Document