Most northerners went to war against the Confederates in 1861 to save the Union rather than to end slavery. The conflict nevertheless resulted in the legal emancipation of all enslaved people in the United States. How did the Civil War become a fight to abolish slavery and did formerly enslaved people achieve political equality during the Reconstruction era? The civil war covers the military events that took place between 1861 and 1865. In this period of the American history the United States was divided into two, the North and the South. This division took opposing positions, against and in favor of the slavery that was being exerted in that period of time. This war was already carrying antecedents because at the beginning the states defended the right to make their own decisions, without having to take into account the federal authority. At …show more content…
Meanwhile some politicians asked for the right to annul the federal distractions in some way or another, the anti-slavery idea was an ideology that became a manifest with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s publication of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. Which “was characterized in the central crime of slavery as the destruction of slave families through sale and violence” (AH 445) Economic inequality also took its share in the causes of this war since the plantation of the south, which was based on cotton, depended on a great deal of the work of the slaves and they opposed the application of the protectionist policies that ruined their economy and chose to defend slavery. While on the other hand the north was already industrialized and slavery did not make sense since this area was already more developed and was seen in a very negative way by its own population. In the year 1860 after the presidential election number 19 in the United States, where Abraham Lincoln and John C. Breckinridge fought for victory. Both sides,