Civil War Dbq

Although the Union’s aim in entering the Civil War was to hold the nation together, the Southern States originally seceded largely because of rising tensions about slavery caused by several key events. Prior to the mid-1800s the government had been skirting around slavery issues and attempting to pacify both sides, but eventually irrepressible problems began to arise and tempers flared, leading to the Civil War in 1861. In the years following the Louisiana Purchase, westward expansion brought up a need to develop a policy concerning the regulation of slave and free territories. At the time, slave states and free states had equal representation, and the addition of a new state could disrupt the balance. This sparked a fiery national debate,

It prevented further territorial expansion of slavery while reinforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, which required people in the North to apprehend and return escaped slaves. While avoiding outright hostilities, the Compromise of 1850 only strengthened the underlying division of the nation, and brought the issue of slavery closer to home to the Northerners as they were forced to directly participate through Fugitive Slave Act. In 1852 a woman named Harriet Beecher Stowe published a fictional and highly romanticized work about the life of a slave called Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It became one of the top selling books in the U.S., second only to the Bible. Its effect was threefold: the Northerners felt as if they had been awakened to the injustices of slavery, it made the issue personal to those who had not previously been directly affected, and it enraged the Southerners as slanderous. Uncle Tom’s Cabin widened the rift between the North and the South that slavery had

Dred Scott was a slave that attempted to sue for his freedom. The case rose to the Supreme Court, and justices ruled in 1857 that slaves were mere property, with none of the rights or recognition assumed to human beings. This decision threatened to overturn the entire basis of the laws that had hitherto managed to prevent a civil war. The classification of slaves as property rose question to the authority of the government to regulate this institution. The Southern states once again challenged the territorial confines of slavery and opposition intensified. In 1859, John Brown, a man with a reputation as a killer and anti-slavery radical from Bleeding Kansas, organized a raid of a government arsenal, hoping to distribute the weapons among slaves to encourage an uprising. Although he was captured immediately, he became greater through his executions, seen as a martyr of the abolitionist cause. This also resulted in an increase of military protection in the South against future