Westward Expansion Essay

By the year 1845, slavery had been outlawed throughout Europe and there was very little transatlantic slave trade going on due to its abolishment in many countries and their colonies. But in the United States, it was still legal, though widely controversial. As America expanded westward, there was a lot of conflict over whether slavery should expand as well. The issue of the expansion of slavery played a major role in the causation of the civil war because of how it reinforced sectionalism between the North and the South and because of the “band-aid fixes” made by the government in an attempt to maintain the free state-slave state balance. The debate over the morality and necessity of slavery created a massive ideology gap between the North

Shortly after the United States won territory to the Pacific in the Mexican-American War, Congress passed the Compromise of 1850 in an attempt to admit California as a free state but still appease the South with stronger fugitive slave laws (Demkin). They hoped this would fix the issue of the westward expansion of slavery but of course it did not. It created stronger sympathy among Northerners for escaped slaves and angered the south because it offset the feeble free state-slave state balance. This quick fix did not hold up long, and when Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 it only fueled the rage. It establish popular sovereignty in the states, saying that they had the right to choose whether or not they became a free/slave state (Demkin). When a rigged election made Kansas a slave state, unrest among Kansans spawned what is known as the Bleeding of Kansas, a series of riots and political unrest over the issue of slavery within the state. This was followed by the Dred Scott v. Sanford Supreme Court decision in 1857 that stated that slaves were property, not citizens (Demkin). This series of events only fueled the fight between the abolitionists of the North and the slave-owning South that eventually led to be called the Civil