Causes Of The American Civil War

The American Civil War was one of the, if not the, most devastating war that America has experienced to date. It was a war waged between the Union, formed of the northern states, and the Confederate States of America, comprised of eleven southern states which seceded from the Union. It is often accepted that the main cause of the Civil War was slavery, but slavery in itself did not lead to the Civil War. It was said by President Abraham Lincoln that the Civil War was not initially about slavery, but about the states that seceded from the Union. Why they seceded was due to other circumstances, which did relate to slavery. The Civil War was caused by increased tensions caused by different priorities between money and morals, different economies,

The North's economy was run around mercantilism. "Commerce boomed during Massachusetts Bay's first decade of settlement in the 1630s. Existing settlers prospered by producing goods for sale to the thousands of new arrivals who took passage each year" (Settlement and Economic Development: The Colonies to 1763, 2015). This was mainly due to the fact that a majority of the land available in the north was not good for growing crops, so what little produce they did have came from small farms. However, in the south agriculture was very successful. In the south the land was very useful for growing commercial crops and big plantations flourished. The big plantations need hands to pick the produce and process it. "At first, plantation labor was provided by white indentured servants, but by the middle of the seventeenth century they had been largely replaced by black slaves. After the American Revolutionary War (1775–83) the plantation system using slave labor became the basis of the Southern economy, and between 1790 and 1860 cotton plantations proliferated in the South" (Plantations 2015). And so their economy, dependent on producing large quantities of cash crops, relied upon a lot of cheap labor. Initially indentured servants were preferred to slaves, but as life spans grew indentured servants became more expensive, and slaves became economically smarter, which is how slavery became tied

As views started to strongly divide over the issue of slavery, it became a fear for both the north and the south that the other side would gain an advantage in Congress and they would lose their way. The beginning of this tension can be found with the 3/5th compromise, which declared that population used for tax and representation, in the House of Representatives, purposes would be base off of "all free persons and 'three-fifths of all other persons'" (Wiecek). This was meant to give slave states fair representation in the House of Representatives because the population of free men in these states were very small compared the population of slaves, and the population of free men in free states. However, this compromise seemed to give slave states an unfair advantage in the House. Things got worse with the Louisiana Purchase, after which territories began applying to become states, and there was again the issue of how to preserve the balance of slave states' and free states' power. In order to maintain the balance Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, which drew a dividing line at 36°30' latitudinal line. It was determined that states above this line would be free states, and states below this line would be slave states. This mitigated the problem for a while, but tensions still remained. The final straw was the election of President