The Real Cause of the Civil War

Causes Of The Civil War

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Exacerbating tensions, the old Whig political party was dying. Many of its followers joined with members of the American Party Know-Nothings and others who opposed slavery to form a new political entity in the s, the Republican Party.

When the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election, Southern fears that the Republicans would abolish slavery reached a new peak. Lincoln was an avowed opponent of the expansion of slavery but said he would not interfere with it where it existed. That was not enough to calm the fears of delegates to an secession convention in South Carolina.

South Carolina had threatened this before in the s during the presidency of Andrew Jackson , over a tariff that benefited Northern manufacturers but increased the cost of goods in the South. Jackson had vowed to send an army to force the state to stay in the Union, and Congress authorized him to raise such an army all Southern senators walked out in protest before the vote was taken , but a compromise prevented the confrontation from occurring.

Perhaps learning from that experience the danger of going it alone, in and early South Carolina sent emissaries to other slave holding states urging their legislatures to follow its lead, nullify their contract with the United States and form a new Southern Confederacy.

Six more states heeded the siren call: Others voted down secession—temporarily. On April 12, the Confederates opened fire with cannons. Lincoln called for volunteers to put down the Southern rebellion. Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee, refusing to fight against other Southern states and feeling that Lincoln had exceeded his presidential authority, reversed themselves and voted in favor of session.

The last one, Tennessee, did not depart until June 8, nearly a week after the first land battle had been fought at Philippi in Western Virginia. The western section of Virginia rejected the session vote and broke away, ultimately forming a new, Union-loyal state, West Virginia. Other mountainous regions of the South, such as East Tennessee, also favored such a course but were too far from the support of Federal forces to attempt it.

Irreconcilable Differences Simmering animosities between North and South signaled an American apocalypse. Any man who takes it upon himself to explain the causes of the Civil War deserves whatever grief comes his way, regardless of his good intentions. Yeats wrote his short poem immediately following the catastrophe of World War I, but his thesis of a great, cataclysmic event is universal and timeless.

It is probably safe to say that the original impetus of the Civil War was set in motion when a Dutch trader offloaded a cargo of African slaves at Jamestown, Va. Of course there were other things, too. For instance, by the eve of the Civil War the sectional argument had become so far advanced that a significant number of Southerners were convinced that Yankees, like Negroes, constituted an entirely different race of people from themselves. It is unclear who first put forth this curious interpretation of American history, but just as the great schism burst upon the scene it was subscribed to by no lesser Confederate luminaries than president Jefferson Davis himself and Admiral Raphael Semmes, of CSS Alabama fame, who asserted that the North was populated by descendants of the cold Puritan Roundheads of Oliver Cromwell—who had overthrown and executed the king of England in —while others of the class were forced to flee to Holland, where they also caused trouble, before finally settling at Plymouth Rock, Mass.

How beliefs such as this came to pass in the years between and reveals the astonishing capacity of human nature to confound traditional a posteriori deduction in an effort to justify what had become by then largely unjustifiable. But there is blame enough for all to go around.

Civil War Causes Articles

From that first miserable boatload of Africans in Jamestown, slavery spread to all the settlements, and, after the Revolutionary War, was established by laws in the states. But by the turn of the 19th century, slavery was confined to the South, where the economy was almost exclusively agricultural. For a time it appeared the practice was on its way to extinction. Then along came Eli Whitney with his cotton gin, suddenly making it feasible to grow short-staple cotton that was fit for the great textile mills of England and France.

But beneath this great wealth and prosperity, America seethed.

Whenever you have two people—or peoples—joined in politics but doing diametrically opposing things, it is almost inevitable that at some point tensions and jealousies will break out. In the industrial North, there was a low, festering resentment that eight of the first 11 U. For their part, the agrarian Southerners harbored lingering umbrage over the internal improvements policy propagated by the national government, which sought to expand and develop roads, harbors, canals, etc.

These were the first pangs of sectional dissension. Then there was the matter of the Tariff of Abominations, which became abominable for all concerned. This inflammatory piece of legislation, passed with the aid of Northern politicians, imposed a tax or duty on imported goods that caused practically everything purchased in the South to rise nearly half-again in price. This was because the South had become used to shipping its cotton to England and France and in return receiving boatloads of inexpensive European goods, including clothing made from its own cotton.

However, as years went by, the North, particularly New England, had developed cotton mills of its own—as well as leather and harness manufactories, iron and steel mills, arms and munitions factories, potteries, furniture makers, silversmiths and so forth. And with the new tariff putting foreign goods out of financial reach, Southerners were forced to buy these products from the North at what they considered exorbitant costs. Smart money might have concluded it would be wise for the South to build its own cotton mills and its own manufactories, but its people were too attached to growing cotton.

Later, South Carolina legislators acted on this assertion and defied the federal government to overrule them, lest the state secede. This set off the Nullification Crisis, which held in theory or wishful thinking that a state could nullify or ignore any federal law it held was not in its best interests. The crisis was defused only when President Andrew Jackson sent warships into Charleston Harbor—but it also marked the first time a Southern state had threatened to secede from the Union. Though the tariff question remained an open sore from its inception in right up to the Civil War, many modern historians have dismissed the impact it had on the growing rift between the two sections of the country.

But any careful reading of newspapers, magazines or correspondence of the era indicates that here is where the feud began to fester into hatred. Some Southern historians in the past have argued this was the root cause of the Civil War. Not only did the tariff issue raise for the first time the frightening specter of Southern secession, but it also seemed to have marked a mazy kind of dividing line in which the South vaguely started thinking of itself as a separate entity—perhaps even a separate country.

All the resenting and seething naturally continued to spill over into politics. The North, with immigrants pouring in, vastly outnumbered the South in population and thus controlled the House of Representatives. That is until , when Missouri applied for statehood and anti-slavery forces insisted it must be free.

That held the thing together for longer than it deserved. In plain acknowledgement that slavery was an offensive practice, Congress in banned the importation of African slaves. Nevertheless there were millions of slaves living in the South, and their population continued growing. Over the years this group became stronger and by the s had turned into a full-fledged movement, preaching abolition from pulpits and podiums throughout the North, publishing pamphlets and newspapers, and generally stirring up sentiments both fair and foul in the halls of Congress and elsewhere.

At first the abolitionists concluded that the best solution was to send the slaves back to Africa, and they actually acquired land in what is now Liberia, returning a small colony of ex-bondsmen across the ocean. This did not sit well with the churchgoing Southerners, who were now subjected to being called unpleasant and scandalous names by Northerners they did not even know. This provoked, among other things, religious schisms, which in the mids caused the American Methodist and Baptist churches to split into Northern and Southern denominations. Somehow the Presbyterians hung together, but it was a strain, while the Episcopal church remained a Southern stronghold and firebrand bastion among the wealthy and planter classes.

Catholics also maintained their solidarity, prompting cynics to suggest it was only because they owed their allegiance to the pope of Rome rather than to any state, country or ideal.

Murderous slave revolts had occurred in Haiti, Jamaica and Louisiana and more recently resulted in the killing of nearly 60 whites during the Nat Turner slave uprising in Virginia in That prompted an obscure congressman from Pennsylvania to submit an amendment to a Mexican War funding bill in that would have prevented slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico—which became known, after its author, as the Wilmot Proviso. In , to the consternation of Southerners, California was admitted into the Union as a free state—mainly because the Gold Rush miners did not want to find themselves in competition with slave labor.

But for the first time it threw the balance of power in the Senate to the Northern states. By then national politics had become almost entirely sectional, a dangerous business, pitting North against South—and vice versa—in practically all matters, however remote.

Slavery and the Civil War: Not What You Think

To assuage Southern fury at the admission of free California, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of , which made Northerners personally responsible for the return of runaway slaves. Contrary to its intentions, the act actually galvanized Northern sentiments against slavery because it seemed to demand direct assent to, and personal complicity with, the practice of human bondage.

During the decade of the s, crisis seemed to pile upon crisis as levels of anger turned to rage, and rage turned to violence. Northern passions were inflamed while furious Southerners dismissed the story en masse as an outrageously skewed and unfair portrayal. After the conflict began it was said that Lincoln, upon meeting Mrs.

Causes of the Civil War

Douglas, overturned the Missouri Compromise and permitted settlers in the Kansas Territory to choose for themselves whether they wanted a free or slave state. Outraged Northern abolitionists, horrified at the notion of slavery spreading by popular sovereignty, began raising funds to send anti-slave settlers to Kansas. Equally outraged Southerners sent their own settlers, and a brutish group known as Border Ruffians from slaveholding Missouri went into Kansas to make trouble for the abolitionists.

Causes Of The Civil War

Into this unfortunate mix came an abolitionist fanatic named John Brown riding with his sons and gang. In the halls of Congress, the slavery issue had prompted feuds, insults, duels and finally a divisive gag rule that forbade even discussion or debate on petitions about the issue of slavery. But during the Kansas controversy a confrontation between a senator and a congressman stood out as particularly shocking. By then, every respectable-sized city, North and South, had a half-dozen newspapers and even small towns had at least one or more; and the revolutionary new telegraph brought the latest news overnight or sooner.

Throughout the North, the caning incident triggered profound indignation that was transformed into support for a new anti-slavery political party. But the people fighting at the time were very much aware of what was at stake, Deaton said. Sometimes, Loewen said, the North is mythologized as going to war to free the slaves. That's more bad history, Loewen said: Abraham Lincoln was personally against slavery, but in his first inaugural, he made it clear that placating the Southern states was more important.

Quoting himself in other speeches, he said, "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. The Best Inaugural Addresses Ever ]. Abolitionism grew in the Union army as soldiers saw slaves flocking to them for freedom, contradicting myths that slavery was the appropriate position for African-Americans, Loewen said. But it wasn't until the Emancipation Proclamation of — which left slavery intact in border states that hadn't seceded — that ending Confederate slavery became an official Union aim.

The argument over whether blacks took up arms to fight for the government that enslaved them is a bitter one, but historians have busted this myth, Deaton said. The idea had been brought up before, University of Tennessee historian Stephen Ash wrote in in the journal Reviews in American History. In January of , Confederate Maj. Cleburne proposed enlisting slaves. When Confederate President Jefferson Davis heard the suggestion, Ash wrote, he "not only rejected the idea but also ordered that the subject be dropped and never discussed again in the army.

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About three weeks before the Civil War ended, however, a desperate Davis changed his tune. White officers did bring their slaves to the front, where they were pressed into service doing laundry and cooking, Loewen said. Slavery was a low point, no doubt, but the era between and was a "nadir of race relations," Loewen said. Tiny steps toward racial equality were reversed.

For example, in the s, decades before Jackie Robinson stepped onto a major league field, a few black baseball players faced down racism to play for the professional leagues. That all changed in the s, Loewen said. Eugenics flourished, as did segregation and "sundown towns," where blacks were either officially or unofficially not allowed. The race-relations nadir gave rise to myths , Loewen said.

American Civil War

It also heralded the Dixie ties now heralded by Union states such as West Virginia and Kentucky, he said. They did send 35, troops to the Confederacy and 90, to the U. Two are for the U. Part of the re-casting of the Civil War may have been an attempt to smooth over North-South relations, Deaton said.

Civil War surgeons were butchers who hacked off limbs without anesthesia. The brave soldier taking a gulp of whiskey and biting down on a bullet while a surgeon takes off one of his limbs with a hacksaw. Fortunately for Civil War casualties, though, field surgery was not quite so brutal.

According to the National Museum of Health and Medicine, anesthesia mostly chloroform was commonly used by both Union and Confederate field surgeons. War dispatches from doctors clearly show that anesthesia was considered a crucial part of surgery, Wunderlich said.

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