By 1830 the South tended to champion, states rights doctrines as a defensive against the North. As the South recognized that control of the government was slipping away, it turned to a states' rights argument to protect slavery. Southerners stated that the federal government was not permitted to interfere with slavery in those states where it already existed. They felt that this interpretation of the Constitution associated with nullification, or perhaps secession would protect their way of life. Slavery contributed to the start of the Civil War as its proposed abolition was seen as a threat to the sovereignty of many Southern states.
I believe that the Civil War began with the debate over the future of slavery. That very issue led to secession, and secession caused a war where the Northern states fought for the ground of the Union, and the South for their independence as a new confederation of states under its own constitution. It seems to me that any disagreement leads to some form of resentment. We tend to not like what we don’t understand, and it was hard for the North to understand why the Southern states were itching for freedom from them. It seems from a broader point of view that the North has gone through so much just for the Southern states of America to exist.
Mexican-American War is a big event in the 19th century, in which the concept of Manifest Destiny was related with war. The Mexican-American War was not only for increased territory, but also a symbol of America's racial misunderstanding. Some White people have the superiority with themselves. [1] They took Mexican people’s land as Manifest Destiny, above all moral and law. Many Americans believe that God give them the power and duty to expand territory, strengthen the United States.
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. The most important factor for the outbreak of the American Civil War was slavery because it caused the initial divides between the North and South. The first divisions were as the USA was undergoing Western Expansion with the issue over whether the new states, such as California and New Mexico should be brought in as Slave states or Free states. The failure to reach a decision over whether new states would be Slave states or Free states meant there was inevitably a conflict that can be seen through to the tensions in Kansas in 1857. The fact that a minor civil war occurred simply over the issue of slavery clearly depicts that slavery was an essential factor in the outbreak of the Civil War.
These causes include the failures of the politicians of the times, the tensions between the states caused by the issue of admitting new states to the Union, the victory by the Republicans in the 1860 Presidential election, the increasing trend towards abolitionism and, of course, slavery. Slavery was a huge issue at the time, with Southerners, strong supporters of slavery and slavers themselves demanding that they be allowed to expand westward with their slaves, while the Northerners were arguing in favour that slavery be contained and allowed to die a natural death. Slavery had started in the South as the climate there was perfect for growing cotton, and with the invention of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in 1793, it became very profitable to make cotton. The cotton gin essentially made the time that it took for the seeds to be removed from cotton to be greatly reduced, making it much more profitable. On order to capitalise on this new process, the south needed lots of cheap labour, and found it in the form of slaves.
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.
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.
The penetration of the colonialist was not welcome by various indigenous communities who resorted to resistance to guard their resources. However, the dominant nations established successful rule over their colonies that led to controlled exploitation of the resources. They contained these resistances and introduced slavery as a means of achieving their primary objective of exploiting resources. Moreover, many European nations adopted slavery and employed it as a form of oppression and persecution. The period between fifteenth and seventeenth century marked and witnessed an increase in adventures between nations of the world to explore new territories, which might contain invaluable resources.
Although Thoreau was not the first to introduce these ideas, he may have been the first to bring it to the attention of many Americans. They both effectively illustrate their philosophy that civil disobedience is a necessity. As I said before, Thoreau was writing during the transcendentalism era in America during the mid 1800s. The main issue behind “Civil Disobedience” is slavery that is taking place in America. By this time, slavery is a very hotly debated issue in America, even eventually leading to the Civil War.
Gordon S. Barker in his book, In Fugitive Slaves and the Unfinished American Revolution: Eight Cases, 1848-1856 he contributes to the stories on American Revolution particularly in an effort to re-image and re-periodize the ‘grand American narrative’ of the U.S revolution by George Bancroft. The book is focused on the other side of the revolution i.e. the Black’s struggle for the war against slavery. For the common American man, the revolution and thus the war ended quite before when compared with the Revolution waged by the African slaves. The African Americans, united in their quest for creating ‘a perfect union’ which at its very earliest ended when the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified.