In A 6-7 Double-spaced, Research Paper, Identify And Analyze The Major Political And Economic Issues, Social And Cultural Forces, Individuals And Groups, As Well As Events From 1787 Through 1861 That Promoted The Civil War.
In A 6-7 Double-spaced, Research Paper, Identify And Analyze The Major Political And Economic Issues, Social And Cultural Forces, Individuals And Groups, As Well As Events From 1787 Through 1861 That Promoted The Civil War.
The American Civil War is one of the key events in the United States history fought between the Northern and Southern States from 1861 to 1865. While the American Revolution of 1776-1783 resulted in the creation of America, the civil war determined what sort of nation America is going to be. The two major questions were on board after the revolution of America, whether the U.S. was going to be a united nation with a sovereign national government or it is going to be a dividable confederation of sovereign states. In addition, another question was that if this nation, created with the ideology of equal rights for all, will continue to remain as the biggest slaveholding nation in the world. The civil war ended the institution of slavery; that was the reason for the division between the nation and the Northern victory preserved the U.S. as one nation. However, this accomplishment resulted in the loss of 625,000 lives, and many American soldiers lost their lives in the earlier wars ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"d4FNgR6G","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(McPherson)","plainCitation":"(McPherson)","noteIndex":0},"citationItems":[{"id":1492,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/local/orkqtrjP/items/UFQVWLKJ"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/local/orkqtrjP/items/UFQVWLKJ"],"itemData":{"id":1492,"type":"webpage","title":"A Brief Overview of the American Civil War","container-title":"American Battlefield Trust","abstract":"This page features an overview of the war written by James McPherson.","URL":"https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/brief-overview-american-civil-war","language":"en","author":[{"family":"McPherson","given":"James"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2008",11,20]]},"accessed":{"date-parts":[["2019",11,13]]}}}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"} (McPherson). The civil war was very destructive in nature between the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the World War I in 1914 and no single event but a series of confrontations and antecedents were responsible for the event.
Political issues
The primary political cause for the Civil War was the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860, and the ensuing secession of seven slave states between December 1860 and February 1861. The election of Lincoln was entirely legal within the existing framework of the U.S. Constitution as it existed at the time it took place. The slave states may not have cast a single electoral vote for Lincoln, indeed not even have him on their ballots, but no one in the South ever made any serious claim that Lincoln's election was not legal. Rather, the purely sectional basis for it portended a loss of influence within the republic, and so the several slave states determined to secede instead of submitting to the will of the majority. This the secession became the ultimate triggering event for the civil war. The Southern states wanted the legality of secession, as a political process, was not clear in 1860. They wanted each state to be sovereign instead of federalist demonstrated after the establishment of the confederacy in 1861.
The Constitution was silent on the matter. Some believed that the states retained some right to it, even under the Constitution, but Lincoln himself provided one of the soundest arguments against that idea in his First Inaugural Address ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"jIW1XBTP","properties":{"formattedCitation":"({\\i{}Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States})","plainCitation":"(Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States)","noteIndex":0},"citationItems":[{"id":1496,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/local/orkqtrjP/items/I5RJC9CU"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/local/orkqtrjP/items/I5RJC9CU"],"itemData":{"id":1496,"type":"webpage","title":"Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States : from George Washington 1789 to George Bush 1989","genre":"Text","URL":"https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp","title-short":"Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States","language":"(SCHEME=ISO639-1) en","accessed":{"date-parts":[["2019",11,13]]}}}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"} (Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States). To say it, if any state had the right to dissolve the Union at a whim, upon whatever motive they deemed worthy, and without the consent of the other states in the Union, then the national government was incompetent. It would be as an international treaty between separate, sovereign States, no more enforceable than any of those. Lincoln, in his letter to Greeley, declared that he wanted to save the union, and the fight is not to save or destroy slavery ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"VT53dVOT","properties":{"formattedCitation":"({\\i{}Abraham Lincoln\\uc0\\u8217{}s Letter to Horace Greeley})","plainCitation":"(Abraham Lincoln’s Letter to Horace Greeley)","noteIndex":0},"citationItems":[{"id":1494,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/local/orkqtrjP/items/XWFJU436"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/local/orkqtrjP/items/XWFJU436"],"itemData":{"id":1494,"type":"webpage","title":"Abraham Lincoln's Letter to Horace Greeley","URL":"http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm","accessed":{"date-parts":[["2019",11,13]]}}}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"} (Abraham Lincoln’s Letter to Horace Greeley). Combined with their belief that the Union could not be sundered by a single state (or group of states) at will was the firm belief of many Unionists that the United States of America represented something important in the history of humankind.
One must remember the time when almost all of the states of the world were ruled by monarchies or despots of one kind or another. The United States was following in the traditions of the democratic city-states of Ancient Greece, and, more notably, the Roman Republic. Americans of the time were keenly aware of the fact that both of those historical examples of representative government ended in failure, and the response to secession was as passionate as it was in large part because many felt it represented the failure of the American Republic. Thus, on one side, they had a group of states bent on separation, determined to create their own republic in order to preserve the rights they held most dear (and we all know what that was, so I will not expound on it here). On the other, they had the states, the people, and the national government bent on not letting them succeed in their efforts at disunion because successful disunion would mean the failure of the American experiment. Both sides were in earnest, and neither side was willing to back down that led to the event of war.
Economic Factors
A number of economic factors also contributed to the Civil War. In reality, the civil war was the inevitable result of the clash of two incompatible economic systems. The South's economy was pre-capitalist and it was economically dominant over the South. It was a highly totalitarian society where people's mail was opened and any opponent of the slave owner regime was subjected to repression. About 40 percent of the South's income was sucked up by the 3,000 largest plantation owning families. The pre-capitalist character of the economy is shown by the largely static technology. Growth occurred through buying more land and slaves, not through technical change, which occurred only rarely. There is no doubt in the fact that the South's economy had a major stake in the trade of slaves and it became the foundation of the strong economy of the South. In 1860 a slave would cost roughly 130,000 dollars in contemporary terms, and this is where much of the wealth of the South was tied up.
Beginning in the early 1800s, however, the north had begun to develop an industrial capitalist economy, and it was growing very rapidly, so the north was dominant over the South. Many new workshops and industrial firms had been created based on a kind of agro-industrial capitalism. Unlike the poor white farmers in the South who still lived peasant-style by subsistence agriculture, farming in the north had converted to cash crop agriculture, so a money economy had taken sway. The top-heavy planter system removed the lower and middle-income jobs from many Southern communities, creating massive amounts of poverty and subsistence living. To escape the (threat of) poverty, many white families in slave states would move to the North ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"ZvkSr3AD","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Collier and Hoeffler)","plainCitation":"(Collier and Hoeffler)","noteIndex":0},"citationItems":[{"id":1498,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/local/orkqtrjP/items/F6PDT9TF"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/local/orkqtrjP/items/F6PDT9TF"],"itemData":{"id":1498,"type":"article-journal","title":"On economic causes of civil war","container-title":"Oxford economic papers","page":"563-573","volume":"50","issue":"4","author":[{"family":"Collier","given":"Paul"},{"family":"Hoeffler","given":"Anke"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["1998"]]}}}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"} (Collier and Hoeffler). There was a reason that the lives of free Blacks got worse with each generation until Reconstruction; the man can flee the self-destructive poverty trap, but the self-destructive poverty trap does not need to flee the man. Many workshops & factories emerged that processed agricultural products, breweries, distilleries, shoe factories, meatpacking plants, flour mills, and so on, and also many factories that made tools or consumer goods that the farming population used their cash income to buy. After the purchase of the Louisiana territory in the early 1800s and the defeat of Mexico in the 1840s, a growing conflict developed over whether the slave-based regime would be allowed to expand out into the newly acquired territories.
By the 1840s and 1850s, a major movement in the north brought the abolitionist movement and growing capitalist interests together, in the form of the Free Soil movement. This became a new political party in the 1850s and became the basis of the Republican Party when it was founded. The capitalist interests in the north wanted to ensure that slavery would not be extended to the new territories in the west because in order to create an economically superior system to slavery. The northern interests wanted the west to gain a population of cash crop farmers and wage-earning workers who would create a growing market for the products of the northern industry. On the other hand, the southern slave-owning ruling class believed that expansion of the slave-based regime to the new territories was essential if the system was to survive. They needed new lands to expand the slave system. They also believed that if the new territories in the west became non-slave states, eventually the southern slave-based system would be politically vulnerable. It was due to the reason that they would no longer be able to dominate the federal state and the slave system might be abolished.
Social and cultural forces
The South's system of a lifetime, inherited, racialized slavery for people of African ancestry was also the cause of the civil war. Defense of that system was mentioned as the key reason for secession by all the states that seceded. The southern ruling class didn’t believe in state’s rights. That’s why they insisted that federal marshals be sent into northern states to capture runaway slaves, even though slavery was illegal in the northern states. This was a denial of the “state’s rights” of the northern states.) There is an insufferable number of people out there who will argue that the Civil War was really about "states' rights." Sure, it was about the states' right to allow slavery to exist. The Confederate states wanted to retain the right to have slavery, and they wanted at least some new western states to have the right to have slavery as well. Their arguments were shallow at best: those same states were more than happy to have the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 require free states to participate in returning escaped slaves to their owners, so those states' rights apparently didn't count. The Dred Scott decision found that a Southern slave owner could take his slaves to a free state, and they would remain enslaved, notwithstanding the laws in that state. So those states' rights didn't really count either.
Other people like to make the Civil War be about economic differences between North and South. Again, that's true: the north had a diversifying economy based on both independent farmers and increasingly industrializing cities (where, yes, a lot of wage laborers had it really bad), while the South had an economy heavily based on, slavery.
A lot of Confederate soldiers were not themselves slave-owners and were really fighting for "their homes" or “their states” or so forth. The Civil War didn’t start because men in the South wanted to go and fight for their homes. The war started because of slavery, and individual soldiers may have signed up to fight to defend their homes, but let’s not confuse cause and effect ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"1WA9FmKV","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Dew)","plainCitation":"(Dew)","noteIndex":0},"citationItems":[{"id":1499,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/local/orkqtrjP/items/YE8IH8FE"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/local/orkqtrjP/items/YE8IH8FE"],"itemData":{"id":1499,"type":"book","title":"Apostles of disunion: Southern secession commissioners and the causes of the Civil War","publisher":"University of Virginia Press","ISBN":"0-8139-3945-3","author":[{"family":"Dew","given":"Charles B."}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2017"]]}}}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"} (Dew). For a modern analogy, individual U.S. soldiers fought in Iraq for a variety of reasons: some believed in the cause, but some signed up for the military to pay for college, or because they wanted an adventure, or because they were from a military family and it was a tradition. But the U.S. didn't invade Iraq to give soldiers something to do while waiting for their GI Bill benefits. It's important to separate why a state goes to war from why individual soldiers enlist for military service. Thus, slavery in society was also one of the ultimate causes of the civil war.
Events from 1787 through 1861 that promoted the Civil War
The civil war initiated because of the compromising events of differences between the slave states and freed states, and as a result, the Southern slave states said to have seceded to form their own government. But after the American Revolution, a number of events contributed to the events of civil war. The term secession was already used in 1776 when South Carolina threatened separation after Congress declared the new taxation rule based on the population. In addition, in 1780, Pennsylvania became the first state to abolish slavery through slavery laws. Following the event in 1783, Massachusetts abolished slavery by granting voting rights to the slaves. By the end of 1787, the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia resulted in the Three-Fifths Clause giving power to the slave states in the House of Representatives ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"tFKEk2bx","properties":{"formattedCitation":"({\\i{}Civil War Events Leading to War Timeline})","plainCitation":"(Civil War Events Leading to War Timeline)","noteIndex":0},"citationItems":[{"id":1490,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/local/orkqtrjP/items/SMPSZRZ3"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/local/orkqtrjP/items/SMPSZRZ3"],"itemData":{"id":1490,"type":"webpage","title":"Civil War Events Leading to War Timeline","URL":"http://www.civil-war.net/pages/timeline.asp","accessed":{"date-parts":[["2019",11,13]]}}}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"} (Civil War Events Leading to War Timeline). First Fugitive Slave Act was passed by Congress in 1793 that allowed for the seizure of escapees. The production value for slaves was recognized in March 1794. Tennessee entered the union as a slave state in June 1796 and the results of 1800 consensus declared the 17% population as slave and majority of the slave were in the Southern states. In March 1807, Congress passed a law prohibition of import and export of slaves, but in the Southern state due to the high trade of Cotton, slavery strengthened. In December 1819, Alabama entered the Union as a slave state. In 1820, The Missouri Compromise was negotiated that permitted Missouri to be admitted in the U.S. as a slave state in 1821 while Maine as the Free State. This compromise drew a line between the free and slave states and it was aimed at keeping a balance between free and slave states. In 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act banned congress from interfering in the trade of slaves and the Conflict over Kansas from 1854 to 1856 that overturned the Missouri Compromise. In 1858, Lincoln-Douglas debated formed the presidential campaign of Abraham Lincoln. In 1860, Lincoln became the 16th president of the U.S. and the richest state South Carolina seceded as a result of his presidency. In 1861, a number of other states also declared secession. Lincoln called for peace in his inaugural speech but on April 12, the first event of the Civil War took place at the Fort Sumter and the federal states had to surrender. This event forced many states to side with the Confederacy for the sake of social unity. In order to hold on to the remaining states, Lincoln fought and the first war of the Civil War occurred in Virginia.
Conclusion
To sum up, a number of events contributed to the Civil War; these comprise a number of economic causes, fight for the resources, fights to own the rights of slavery, a number of political causes. Besides, a series of events following the American Revolution also led to the war and every event holds some significance in playing a part in initiating the Civil War. Despite what the causes were, it is declared as one of the most dreadful events of the history that resulted in the loss of many lives, bloodshed and massacre.
Works Cited
ADDIN ZOTERO_BIBL {"uncited":[],"omitted":[],"custom":[]} CSL_BIBLIOGRAPHY Abraham Lincoln’s Letter to Horace Greeley. http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm. Accessed 13 Nov. 2019.
Civil War Events Leading to War Timeline. http://www.civil-war.net/pages/timeline.asp. Accessed 13 Nov. 2019.
Collier, Paul, and Anke Hoeffler. “On Economic Causes of Civil War.” Oxford Economic Papers, vol. 50, no. 4, 1998, pp. 563–73.
Dew, Charles B. Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. University of Virginia Press, 2017.
Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States : from George Washington 1789 to George Bush 1989. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp. Accessed 13 Nov. 2019.
McPherson, James. “A Brief Overview of the American Civil War.” American Battlefield Trust, 20 Nov. 2008, https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/brief-overview-american-civil-war.
