Although the origins of the Civil War are widely debated, it 's undeniable that there were several main factors that were indisputable causes of the Civil War. The biggest origins were slavery, the Secession, sectionalism and sectional conflict, sectional political power, Southern and Northern nationalism, modernization in the Antebellum Period, etc. Moreover, there are several essays and documents from the "Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction" book that support the origins of the Civil War that I listed above.
The sectional conflict of the mid-nineteenth century was a defining period in American history. After eight decades of existence as a sovereign independent state, the United States broke apart. As a result, a long and destructive war ensued, after which the victorious North and the defeated South continued to struggle over their reunification. (Pg. 1) Moreover, there was a showdown between the slave South and the free-labor North. (Pg. 4) Historian Charles Beard stated that “the sectional conflict arose from the contending economic interests of plantation agriculture and industrializing capitalism. Slavery happened to be the labor system of plantation agriculture. As a result, the war was a class conflict between a Yankee capitalist
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While the South was a labor-intensive, labor-repressive undiversified agricultural economy. Moreover, the contrasting economic systems of the antebellum North and South helped to generate the conflicting proslavery and antislavery ideologies that eventually led to the war. Therefore, Northern victory was a triumph for the northern economic system and the social moral and values that it had generated. The war basically destroyed the national political power of the planter class. As a result, the war created a massive shift toward national domination by the northern model of competitive democratic free-labor capitalism. (pg.