Civil War Dbq

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The reason why the United States fought in a Civil War was due to the North and the South not being able to reach an agreement on which states should become slave states, and which would remain free states. This Disagreement was caused by the United States gaining several new states and territories from the Mexican-American war. After that war had ended the South feared that the North would vote to ban slavery for good because the land America gained from Mexico gave the north more states. The Civil War was also caused by fights that broke out in the new states and territories between the North and the South. Due to all the fighting in the states and the disagreements in congress, the United States ended up in a Civil War that split the nation …show more content…

This is due to the fact the North outnumbered the South through the Missouri Compromise and there was no way to work around this issue. Upon congress realizing that the compromise was no longer fair and the free and slave states would not be split evenly, they replaced it with the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed people, from the North and South to relocate to whichever state they wanted, in hopes of changing the state vote through the practice of Popular Sovereignty. Popular Sovereignty is where the state and its government make decisions based on what the people that live in that state want. The state vote would determine if the state was to stay a free state or become a slave state. This played in the Souths favor, because this allowed them a fighting chance in persuading more states to convert to slave states. Congress assumed that letting the people decide which state should be free and which should be proslavery would potentially help get the states back to even amounts. However this lead to fighting and the North and the South growing farther …show more content…

Some small groups of Northerners banded together and moved west towards the new states to fight back, one of these Northerners was John Brown. John Brown was a supporter of abolishing slavery in the south. These Northerners decided to use scare tactics to make the Southerners leave. Over time the Southerners and Northerners where using the same tactics on each other. This eventually caused even more fighting and blood shed all over the country. The Northerners then decided to fight back by making a militia to fight the South. In turn, the South made their own militia to counteract the North’s, and worked to defend their conversion of the new

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