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John Hogan

13 May 2005

 

Causes of the Civil War

 

            America in the mid 19th Century was a nation divided against itself.  The states of the South and those of the North were waging political war against one another on the battleground of Washington, D.C.  Eventually this political war turned military with the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter.  The Constitution of the United States was a contributing factor in sparking this war along with other regional and sectional issues.

            There is no doubt that the Constitution helped to usher in the outbreak of the Civil War.  By failing to address the issue of slavery at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, its authors doomed slavery to be put off until after 1808 when it was growing due to the demand for cotton that the Industrial Revolution began.  The Constitution helped to divide the nation in another way as well, in the argument of state vs. national power.  Jefferson Davis, and indeed most southerners, believed that is was “Strange, indeed,…(the Constitution has) proved unavailing to prevent the rise and growth in the Northern states of a political school which has persistently claimed that the government thus formed was not a compact between States, but was in effect a national government, set up above and over the States.”  This quote characterizes perfectly the belief in the South that the states should be more powerful than national government whereas in the North the situation was opposite.  The two effects are the most profound ones the Constitution had in starting the Civil War.

            Regional issues contributed to the beginning of the Civil War as well.  The main divide in this area was the morals of slavery.  Abolitionists, coming mostly from the North, such as William Lloyd Garrison believed that “Three millions of the American people (referring to slaves) are crushed under the American Union!  They are held as slaves, trafficked as merchandise, registered as goods and chattels!”  This is in start contrast to the Southern opinion which held that people of color were inferior to whites and should therefore do the heavy labor for the whites.  This was very much a hot button issue in the years leading up to the Civil War.

            The final, major set of issues dividing the North and the antebellum South were sectional.  It is a fact that the South’s economy at that time was dependent on slavery.  The demand for cotton and other raw materials had skyrocketed since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.  To this demand slaves were needed and the slave industry became even more important.  The efforts of abolitionists threatened slavery and in doing so the South’s economy causing them to dislike the North that much more.  Another sectional issue was the amount of political power the South held.  On a map the South looks large.  That’s because it is; however, most of that land was taken up by fields and wilderness so in the end they had more people and therefore more Congressmen.  This weakness was fully exhibited with Lincoln’s election in 1860 despite almost nobody in the South voting for him and his not being on the ballot in ten Southern states.  That incident was the straw that broke the camel’s back for the South and they decided that since they had no political power in the Union they might as well form their own separate nation, the Confederate States of America.  That was key in leading to the Civil War.

            Most of these events could have been avoided.  Instead, paranoia and distrust led to the bloodiest and costliest war ever fought on American soil.  In the end, the South was defeated, slavery outlawed, and the Union restored.  However, the conflict did not justify the cost and lessons should be taken from it as what not to do during a disagreement and liberty always respected because as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “A man’s right to liberty is as unalienable as his right to life…”