What Caused The American Civil War

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Civil War history begs the question why? Ask the average person what caused the American Civil War and they will probably answer slavery. They are right; of course, slavery was the primary and most obvious cause of the war. There had been tension over slavery since the nation’s founding in 1776 and numerous compromises over the slavery issue had served to quell tensions for a time, but never to eliminate them. The most famous was the Compromise of 1820. Yet, other subtle forces served to turn the United States into two different regions, with two different value systems. Issues such as Chief Justice Roger Taney and the Supreme Court ruling in the Dred Scott case coupled with the election of Lincoln brought the slavery issue to a head. In Civil…show more content…
Northern factory workers and other city-dwellers were accustomed to look to the government for protection and services. Local officials were a prominent part of city life. By contrast, the South had an entirely different way of life. The southern region’s geography and climate made it ideal for agriculture, especially for the growing of rice and cotton. In the early days of southern settlement, slaves were few, but were considered more efficient workers in the rice paddies than white indentured or hired laborers. Their African heritage gave the slaves better immunity than the white workers had, against the malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases that plagued the south’s tidewater area. Cotton initially was not a great cash crop, but the rise of the northern textile mills greatly increased the demand for cotton. The cotton gin invented by Eli Whitney also made cotton growing more profitable. This machine was operated by one person and could clean far more cotton in an hour than several workers could clean by hand. Planters chose to use slaves to plant and pick the cotton, because slaves were considered less expensive than hired labor. Many historians believe that slavery might have died out on its own, if it had not been for the invention of the cotton…show more content…
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
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