CAUSES OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
http://www.nps.gov/archive/gett/getteducation/bcast01/gcast-2.htm
After the Constitution was adopted in 1789, creating one nation, differences between the states were worked out through compromises. By 1861 the following differences between the Northern States (which include the Mid-western and Western States) and the Southern States had become so great that compromise would no longer work. Thus, a conflict started within our nation that was called the Civil War.
Tariffs- For more than 40 years, arguments between the North and South had been growing. One of these quarrels was about taxes paid on goods brought into this country from foreign countries. This kind of tax is called a tariff. In 1828, Northern businessmen urged passage of the “Tariff Act”. The purpose of the law was to encourage the manufacture of products in the United States, and to encourage the South to buy these products from the North instead of from Europe or pay more to get goods from the North. Either way, the Southern people were forced to pay more because of the efforts of Northern businessmen. Though most tariff laws had been changed by the time of the Civil War, the Southern people still remembered how they had been treated by the Northern people, especially the business class.
States Rights- In the years before the Civil War, the balance of political power in the Federal Government, centered in Washington, D.C., was changing. The Northern and Mid-Western States were becoming more and more powerful as their population increased. This meant that the Southern States were losing political power in the Federal government and southern politicians felt that their interests were not being served. Westward expansion was also considered a risk to southern interests, as Federal authority appeared to subdue the desires of people living in those territorial states. Just as the original thirteen colonies fought for independence almost 90 years earlier, southern states felt a growing need for freedom from the central Federal government. They felt that each state should make its own laws and govern itself without Federal interference. This issue was called “States Rights”. Some Southern States wanted to secede, or break away, from the United States of America and govern themselves and it was a hot issue right up to the presidential elections in 1860.
Slavery- Another quarrel between the North and the South, and perhaps the most emotional one, was over the issue of slavery. Agriculture was the South’s primary industry and cotton the primary farm product. Not having the use of machines, it took a great amount of human labor to pick cotton. A large number of slaves were used to provide labor. Many slaves were also used to provide labor for the various household chores that needed to be done. Many Northerners thought that owning slaves was wrong, for any reason and they loudly disagreed with the South’s laws and beliefs concerning slavery. Yet slavery had been a part of the American way of life for over 200 years. The Constitution of the United States of America guaranteed the right to own property and protected it against seizure, or take-over. A slave was property in the eyes of many. The people of the Southern States did not like the Northern people telling them that owning a slave was a great wrong and were disappointed that northern governments did not pursue, capture, and return fugitive slaves who escaped to the North despite the passage of a Federal law in 1850. A person believed that slavery was either right or wrong, so how could two people arguing over such an issue compromise?
CLOSE-UP CORNER: Pick one of the causes of the Civil War to research and learn more about. Present information to the class in the form of a bulletin board display.
Election of Abraham Lincoln- Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States in 1860. He vowed to keep the country united and the new western territories free from slavery. Despite Lincoln’s promise to not interfere with slavery in the South, many Southerners were afraid that he was not sympathetic to their way of life and would not treat them fairly. Lincoln’s personal and political views of slavery were evolving, but at this point he was primarily concerned with keeping the United States together as one nation.
Secession- South Carolina was the first state to secede, or break away, from the United States soon after the election of Abraham Lincoln. Six other states quickly followed and also seceded. These states joined together and formed a new nation which they named the Confederate States of America and Jefferson Davis was elected the Confederacy’s first president. On April 12, 1861 the Confederate States of America bombarded Fort Sumter in South Carolina, which was held by Federal (Union) troops and flew the United States flag. As open conflict increased, other states seceded and joined the Confederacy. The fighting of the Civil War had begun.
The expansion of slavery into the territories, tariffs, internal improvements... pick your favorite conentious political issue of the antebellum period... explaining the “why?” behind The Civil War has too oftened focused on the “trees in the forest” rather than the bigger picture of the forest itself. In a nutshell, the “why?” behind The Civil War can best be summed up in three short words (as Joe Biden might say... except in this case it actually IS three words): GOVERNMENT BY CONSENT
Keeping this in mind, here’s my simplest explanation of the “why?” behind The Civil War.
For some four decades in the early/mid 1800s Southerners watched as the Northern states got bigger and bigger, and thus came to dominate more and more of the federal government (at least in terms of numbers, especially in the House of Representatives and despite the 3/5ths Compromise). For a while (1820s - late 1850s) this disparity was concerning to them (Southerners), as the South for the most part had a very diffenet political agenda/set of priorities than the North (see issues at top of post), but remained a managable problem. Why did it remain a managable problem? Because, with a few tariffs laws and some internal improvement projects notwithstanding, institutional impediments in the national political structure prevented the Northern States from using their population advantage to impose much of their political agenda (like barring slavery from the Western territories) upon the South.
The most important of the institutional impediments to the North imposing its political will upon the South was the two-party system... which saw the Whigs and Democrats - political parties of comparable electoral strength and competitive pretty much all across the country - unable to appeal or govern too much in favor of or against the interests of either North or South. Neither party could stake out positions TOO unfavorable to either Northern or Southern opinions... without alienating half their supporters and throwing control of the Congress and the presidency to the other party. In essence, though the North controlled the House of Representatives because (by the 1850s) the free states had nearly twice the population of the slaves states, after the Compromise of 1850 (California statehood) had a two vote edge in Senate, and for many years now comprised enough electoral votes to essentially choose the president regardless of how anyone in the South voted... neither the Northern Whigs nor the Northern Democrats could go too far in trying to steer the country away from its more moderate trajectory in terms of sectional arguments without commiting electoral suicide for their party.
Unfortunatley for the South, the debate over the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act (which opened up - potentially - these previously designated free terrories to slavery via popular sovereignty) and the outbreak of violence in Kansas that followed destroyed the coalition of Northern Whigs and Southern Whigs that comprised one of the nation’s two major political parties. And,it didn’t take long for a new political party, called the Republicans, to fill that void in establishing themselves as the main opposition to the Democrats. Of course, there was one major difference between the Whigs as the main opposition to the Democrats and the new Republican Party that now assumed that role.
The new Republican Party was a Northern party only... not a national party at all like the Whigs had been and the Democrats still were. Every position they took on every issue (slavery in the territories, tariffs, internal improvements still being amongst the more divisive of sectional disputes) embranced the dominant Northern perspective and rejected the dominant Southern perspective. And throughout the 1850s-early 1860s the Republicans neither tried nor even pretended to be a national party. In fact, they didn’t bother to recruit members or field candidates in most slave states, they didn’t campaign in slave states, and when they fielded their first candidate for president in 1856 - John C. Fremont from California - he wasn’t even on the ballot in half the states of the union. To give you a sense of what that would be like today... that would be like Barack Obama not even being on the ballot in every state south of Virginia-Kentucky-Missouri. Literally, if you wanted to vote for Fremont in 1856 (or for that matter Abraham Lincoln in 1860) and you lived in Alabama... you had to scribble in his name as a write-in candidate as if he were Mickey Mouse or Frank Zappa.
The rise of the Northern Republican Party, with its platform diametrically opposed to everything important to the vast majority of Southerners, scared the crap out of the South. All of the sudden, it because a very real possibility that in the very short term a Northern political faction could take over the whole federal government. In their first election (1856), though the Repulicans didn’t win the presidency... Fremont scored a very respectable 114 electoral votes to James Buchanan’s 174, and it was actually much closer than that. Had just one more big Northern State - say Pennsylvania - plus maybe a couple of New Jersey’s electors gone Fremont’s way instead... he would have won. The message heard in the South was very simple: If the Northerns band together and all vote for the Republicans next time... they’ll win the presidency and perhaps a working majority in Congress without even being on the ballot in our states. And then, they’ll be able to do whatever they want to us and we won’t be able to stop a bit of it.
Going into the 1860 election the growing sentiment in the South was this: If the Republicans take over (understood as... if Abraham Lincoln wins the presidency) we’re outta here. We don’t want to be part of a country anymore run by a sectional Northern party that we have ZERO influence over... and where we’ll never again have a legitimate opportunity to pursue our national agenda with any prospects for success. We’d rather strike out on our own... and even if we end up failing... at least it will because we made our own bad decisions and not because we had them imposed upon us by the Yankees. And so when Lincoln did indeed win... the states of the Deep South - beginning with South Carolina - followed through with their threat of secession. And once South Carolina chose to divorce itself from Washington DC... so too did every other state between Georgia/Florida and Texas.
And what did they base their decision to secede upon? The principle of GOVERNMENT BY CONSENT... the very same principle that Thomas Jefferson used to justify secession from the British Empire in 1776 in his famous Declaration of Independence. Just as the folks back then had revoked their consent to any longer being told what to do by King George III and Lord North because they believed they were being oppressed... the folks in the South revoked their consent to any longer being under the sway of the President, Congress, or Supreme Court of the USA because they feld like they were or were about to be oppressed.
Of course the North (or at least Abraham Lincoln once he became president) didn’t see it as a principled independence movement based upon the ideal of GOVERNMENT BY CONSENT. They saw it as the South “not respecting the results of an election they lost fair and square.” The North’s collective response was, “how can you have a functioning democratic constitutional republic when the losers pick up their toys and go home whenever they don’t get to be in charge?” And this too was a legimate point of view. For let’s just say Lincoln lets the South go... then what? The next time a section of the country or political faction doesn’t like the results of an election what are they going to do... secede too? This happens too many times and before long North America turns into a balkanized continent of petty bickering states just like Europe... and who wanted to turn America into the mess that was Europe in the 1800s?