What Caused The American Civil War Essay

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1845-1861 brought with it a hard time of violence in the United States and the beginning of a brutal war. Events and ideals must be analyzed to determine which ones caused the American Civil War. Slavery had been a conflicted way of life for many years in America and been changing in the mid 1800s. The United States’ move west caused a violent time and territory called Bleeding Kansas. The North couldn’t seem to make up its mind during this time before the Civil War, and its hypocrisy angered the South. The American Civil War was caused by slavery, Bleeding Kansas, and the North’s indecisiveness during the immediate years before the Civil War. Conflict over slavery between the North and South had been present for many years. The popular Northern …show more content…

The North started to take hypocritical and selfish views in the eyes of southerners, which angered those pro-slavery even more. The Dred Scott v. Sandford case was about a slave--Dred Scott--who had been brought with his masters to Illinois--a free state. Dred Scott believed that he should be free since he was now living in a free state, but his case was turned down by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. Congress was also primarily whites who were pro-slavery, even congressmen from the North were the majority pro-slavery. These things angered the South even more because it showed how hypocritical the North was. They abolished slavery in northern states and claimed that slavery was morally wrong, but they allowed slavery in cases like Dred Scott and the majority of northern politicians were pro-slavery. The South didn’t understand why these things were happening, but northerners were still fighting against slavery and its spread. The south got so fed up with northerners by this point that they seceded from the union and started to be violent when they attacked northerners and supplies at Fort