Civil War Dbq Essay

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The United States in the years right before the Civil War was in chaos as it tried to find ways to keep the country together. Slavery induced this, with the South supporting it while the North made it illegal in their territories. This caused opposing viewpoints in Congress. Luckily, there was a balance of free and slave states in the country, so each party had an equal say on topics. As a result, admitting new states was difficult. Southerners did not want Northerners to have more representatives, and vice versa. Then, in 1820, the Missouri Compromise allowed two states to join the nation, preserving the balance of slave holding and free states. This eased the congressional debate on slavery, until the topic of admitting four free states was introduced. Now, Southerners felt that soon they would be outnumbered, so they threatened to secede. In hopes of keeping the country together, Henry Clay devised the Compromise of 1850. This plan settled …show more content…

Soon, fighting broke out between the two groups, causing Kansas to be called “Bleeding Kansas”. This American mayhem skyrocketed when Chief Justice Roger B. Taney said that Congress had no power to regulate the slavery. The inevitable happened two years later when John Brown, a fervent abolitionist, decided to harm slave supporters. This contributed to the South’s want to secede. The election of Lincoln as president made matters worse as he was an abolitionist. At this point, the southern states believed that they could no longer remain in the Union. They decided to leave and form the Confederate States of America. In this “country”, the government was supposed to have less power than the states and support slavery. At that time, Southerners were annoyed at how the North treated them, so when Union troops set foot on Fort Sumter, a military base that the Confederacy supposedly owned, shots let loose. This was the the first battle of the Civil