Question

What Primarily Caused the Civil War?

Answer 1

• During the early 1800’s it became quiet apparent that the north and the south were growing apart in not only ideology but also culture. As the industrial north continued to grow and flourish with waves of immigrants coming to the U.S in search of the “American Dream” the south continued to rely heavily on the institution of slavery.
• Many southerners considered the north to be full of abolitionists who were simply trying to push big government as well as industrial progressivism on them. To the average southerner this was an attack on their culture.
  
• While this war is very well known and thoroughly researched, there is still a lot of debate about the causation of the war breakout. Some historians claim that the main cause of the Civil War was the institution of Slavery.
• Southern states needed the institution to help with their main source of economy; agriculture.
• Northern states, however, were primarily manufacturing states and did not have as great of a need for slavery. The opposing belief is that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights.
• Southern states claimed that their rights were being taken away by the federal government with their voices being diminished and slavery being taken away.
• Some say that it wasn’t only the fact that their institution of slavery was being taken away; rather, the issue was that the federal government even had the power to do so.
• In many cases today, northern states believe the main issue was slavery while southern states believe the main issue was states’ rights.
• The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states.
• When Abraham Lincoln won election in 1860 as the first Republican president on a platform pledging to keep slavery out of the territories, seven slave states in the deep South seceded and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America.
• The incoming Lincoln administration and most of the Northern people refused to recognize the legitimacy of secession.
• They feared that it would discredit democracy and create a fatal precedent that would eventually fragment the no-longer United States into several small, squabbling countries.