In plain acknowledgement that slavery was an offensive practice, Congress in 1808 banned the importation of African slaves. The South simply did not believe him. On April 12, the Confederates opened fire with cannons. Lincoln called for volunteers to put down the Southern rebellion. HistoryNet.com is brought to you by Historynet LLC, the world's largest publisher of history magazines. 1. These influential journals, from Richmond to Charleston and myriad points in between, painted a sensational picture of Lincoln in words and cartoons as an arch-abolitionist—a kind of antichrist who would turn the slaves loose to rape, murder and pillage. 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. It was designed to protect both Northern and Southern interests. But there is blame enough for all to go around. The immediate provocation for secession of the states, which led to the war, was the election of. 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. The South, however, continued to hold onto a social order based on white supremacy in both private and political life, not unlike that under the rule of racial apartheid that persisted in South Africa for decades. One of the most shocking events occurred when one-quarter of the nation's army surrendered in Texas under the command of General David E. Twigg. Washington: Beverley Tucker, 1854. government asserted that right by seizing federal property within its states’ borders. Some Southern historians in the past have argued this was the root cause of the Civil War. Douglas won only Missouri and a portion of New Jersey. (The western section of Virginia rejected the session vote and broke away, ultimately forming a new, Union-loyal state, West Virginia. In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act, sponsored by frequent presidential candidate Stephen A. Douglas, overturned the Missouri Compromise and permitted settlers in the Kansas Territory to choose for themselves whether they wanted a free or slave state. Population of the United States 1860: Compiled from the Original Returns of the 8th Census. On April 10, 1861, knowing that resupplies were on their way from the North to the federal garrison at Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, provisional Confederate forces in Charleston demanded the fort’s surrender. Depicting the evils of slavery, it offered a vision of slavery that few in the nation had seen before. [cat totalposts=’25’ offset=’0′ category=’1088′ excerpt=’true’ order=’desc’ orderby=’post_date’], [cat totalposts=’25’ offset=’25’ category=’1088′ excerpt=’true’ order=’desc’ orderby=’post_date’], [cat totalposts=’25’ offset=’50’ category=’1088′ excerpt=’true’ order=’desc’ orderby=’post_date’], [cat totalposts=’25’ offset=’75’ category=’1088′ excerpt=’true’ order=’desc’ orderby=’post_date’], [cat totalposts=’25’ offset=’100′ category=’1088′ excerpt=’true’ order=’desc’ orderby=’post_date’], [cat totalposts=’25’ offset=’125′ category=’1088′ excerpt=’true’ order=’desc’ orderby=’post_date’], VIDEO: Battery H Of The 3rd Pennsylvania Heavy Artillery At Gettysburg, Dan Bullock: The youngest American killed in the Vietnam War. 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. The first organized government in the U.S. after the Revolution was under the Articles of Confederation. Later, South Carolina legislators acted on this assertion and defied the federal government to overrule them, lest the state secede. While we will examine some various reasons for the buildup of tension between the Southern states and the . No matter how distasteful he found the practice of slavery, the overarching philosophy that drove Lincoln was a hard pragmatism that did not include the forcible abolition of slavery by the federal government—for the simple reason that he could not envision any political way of accomplishing it. that plunged the U.S. into a civil war from 1861 to 1865. The fight even erupted on the floor of the Senate when anti-slavery proponent Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was beaten on the head by South Carolina Sen. Preston Brooks. As a practical matter, all of this assured a victory for the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, who was widely, if wrongly, viewed in the South as a rabid abolitionist. Pro- and anti-slavery groups rushed to populate the new territories. Interestingly, many if not most of the wealthiest Southerners were opposed to secession for the simple reason that they had the most to lose if it came to war and the war went badly. Ownership of more than a handful of slaves bestowed respect and contributed to social position, and slaves, as the property of individuals and businesses, represented the largest portion of the region’s personal and corporate wealth, as cotton and land prices declined and the price of slaves soared. If there is a case to be made on what caused the Civil War, the Southern press and its editors would be among the first in the dock. The Abolitionist Movement Who Were the Democratic Presidents of the United States? DeBow, J.D.B. The question “what caused the U.S. Civil War?” has been debated since the horrific conflict ended in 1865. The sides of this debate were largely drawn between northern and southern states, thus widened the growing divide within the nation. African American History Timeline: 1700 - 1799, The Hoax That a Tariff Provoked the Civil War, Opposition to Reconstruction: The Rise of the KKK and Other Hate Groups, The National Association of Colored Women, Black Representation in Government: Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisolm, and more, Police Racism, Violence, and Black Lives Matter, Statistical View of the United States, Compendium of the Seventh Census, Statistical view of the United States in 1850, Population of the United States 1860: Compiled from the Original Returns of the 8th Census. Abolitionists fought to have slavery declared illegal in those territories, as the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had done in the territory that became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. Outraged Northern abolitionists, horrified at the notion of slavery spreading by popular sovereignty, began raising funds to send anti-slave settlers to Kansas. What caused the American Civil War? A steady flow of immigrants, especially from Ireland and Germany during the potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s, insured the North a ready pool of laborers, many of whom could be hired at low wages, diminishing the need to cling to the institution of slavery. But when Northern abolitionists made a martyr of him, Southerners came to believe this was proof the North intended to wage a war of extermination against white Southerners. Slavery was interwoven into the Southern economy even though only a relatively small portion of the population actually owned slaves. Others fought to preserve the Union. ... Pfc. A visitor in the 1830s described the relentless cycle of the planters’ misallocation of spare capital: “To sell cotton to buy Negroes—to make more cotton to buy more Negroes—‘ad infinitum.’”. This was shot down amid much debate. At the same time, the increase in the number of plantations willing to move from other crops to cotton created an even greater need for enslaved people. In 1857 the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its infamous Dred Scott decision, which elated Southerners and enraged Northerners. Within two years it was a nationwide and worldwide bestseller. In this study, the surveyed adult Liberians identified greed and corruption most frequently as the causes of the conflict (63%). Join now. The 13 states formed a loose Confederation with a very weak federal government. The immediate cause of the American Civil War was the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor in April of 1861. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools. While the economy of the Northern states was driven by industries, the same was driven by … // < ! As America began to expand—first with the lands gained from the Louisiana Purchase and later with the Mexican War—the question arose of whether new states would be pro-slavery states or free states. 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. 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