Causes Of Secession

In the early 1800s, when plantation owners left almost all other crops in favour of the newly profitable cotton. To increase cotton production planters purchased more slaves from Africa and the West Indies before the slave trade was banned in 1808. Thousands of blacks were brought into the United States during these years to tend to cotton fields, the size of plantations increased from relatively small plots to huge farms with as many as several hundred slaves each. Because the entire Southern economy became dependent on cotton, it also became dependent on slavery. Although Northern factories certainly benefited indirectly from slavery, Northern social customs were not tied to slavery as Southern customs were.

Events in the 1850s proved that

The South, for its part, had justified secession by claiming that slave states had to secede to save their and their way of life. The fact that the Border States where slavery was practice remained in the Union severely weakened this claim. Lincoln remained careful not to offend slave owners in the Border States. The example of his sensitivity to this issue is the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, which declared slaves free in only the secessionist states not the loyal Border States. Union’s eventual victory. Although both the North and the South thought they would easily win the Civil War, the South was in many ways fate from the start. Indeed by 1864 the South was in ruins, its economy destroyed by blockade, the North’s campaign of total warfare. In the end, it was the Northern economy and deficiencies in the Southern political system that won and lost the

The price of goods was so high and was so worthless that it cost Southerners in some places several hundred Confederate dollars to buy a single loaf. As a result hunger and no nutrient became bad, in addition, much of the land from Tennessee to Georgia and up to South Carolina had been destroyed by General William Tecumseh Sherman’s troops on their March to the Sea. Many slaves in the South effectively freed themselves by refusing to work and flocking to Union lines in droves. The North meanwhile was in many ways better off in 1864 than it had been before the war, for the economy had experienced an enormous boom during the war years and had set the industrial machine into high gear. This industrial boom in the North, coupled with inability pf Richmond’s government to provide cohesive leadership, won the war for the Union. Virtually all the effective measures passed by the Union government went unanswered by the Confederacy. Congress in Washington DC for example, stabilized the Northern economy early on in the war by passing the Legal Tender Act, replacing the hundreds of different state and private bank currencies with a single federal