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Origins Of The Civil War Essay

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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 …show more content…

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.

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The Civil War was fought due to irreconcilable differences between the free (northern states) and slave states (southern states) over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the

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The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South by Bruce Levine reiterates the compelling story of how the Civil War overturned the economic, political, and social lifestyle of the Old South. This war downright destroyed the Confederacy and the society it both represented and protected ever since the institution of slavery was established. Explained through words from those who endured it, Levine’s work illustrates the way in which a war endeavored to preserve the “status quo” fundamentally become a second American Revolution. The only difference? Soldiers were fighting their neighbors rather than an outside force.

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Some of the contributing factors that led to the Civil War were the foreign relations, supreme court cases, and presidential elections. One cause of the Civil War was the Mexican-American War, where American gained a lot of territory. The rapid acquisition of land in the Mexican-American War also brought up the issue of slavery being brought to the new territories. People wanted their individual havens pushing them to expand outwards because lands kept becoming overpopulated. Proslavery Southerners wanted the new land to allow slavery because slavery is what pushed the Southern economy forward; in contrast the North wanted the territory to be free because Northerners believed slavery was a moral issue.

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In the years of 1820s through the 1860s, a growing sectional conflict centered around slavery signaled the coming of a war between the north and the south, which almost tore down the union. According to some revisionist historians, Civil War, one of the greatest tragedies in the American history, was absolutely avoidable and resulted merely from “fanaticism and misunderstanding,” along with the failure of the political leaders to compromise; however, this is not the case. Looking back into history, the war was arguably made inevitable by the the cause of slavery. A series of factors in the antebellum age led to the outbreak of Civil War; these factors included social differences, economic issues, as well as political tensions generated by

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In the nineteenth century, sectional tensions were running high, but were unable to be eased since the effectiveness of political compromise was lacking, due to the inevitability of war. This was a result of “inherent antagonism” between the interests of planters and those of industrialists. Those in the North were irrevocably opposed to slavery on a moral and economic basis since they feared that slavery might spread into their own region or into the West and threaten the position of free white laborers. In contrast, many Southerners had built up a lifestyle and code of honor on the very basis of slavery and the idea that they, as a race, were superior. Though both sides worked hard to help smooth over the growing differences between the two

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