John Hogan
13 May 2005
Causes of the Civil War
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
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