Slavery had been an historical problem and is one of the prime causes of Civil War. The North and South were not unanimous on the issue of slavery. The United States was separated into two; with the South supporting slavery and the North opposing it. Slavery was fading in the Northern area, Border States and urban areas. However, it was expanding rapidly in the South due to highly profitable cotton districts. In 1857, the Congressional compromise for Popular Sovereignty in Kansas was ended by the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision. Chief Justice Taney 's decision said that slaves were "... so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War#Slavery) It bolstered the Southern case within …show more content…
The Southern on the other hand, demanded free trade. Since they could not come up with a compromise, it was one of the factors causing the Civil War.
National Crisis Nationalism was a powerful force in the early 19th century. Nearly all Northerners supported the Union but the Southerners were split between those loyal to the United States and those loyal to the southern region and then the Confederacy. C. Vann Woodward said of the latter group,
"A great slave society ... had grown up and miraculously flourished in the heart of a thoroughly bourgeois and partly puritanical republic. It had renounced its bourgeois origins and elaborated and painfully rationalized its institutional, legal, metaphysical, and religious defenses ... When the crisis came it chose to fight. It proved to be the death struggle of a society, which went down in ruins. (C. Vann Woodward (1971), American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue, p.281)
Election of Abraham