The causes of the Civil War were many. Some historians
say the reasons can be traced all the way back to Colonial times
when troubles between "Tidewater" (coastal region)
and "Piedmont" (the interior) settlers often reflected
differences in philosophies of government. The Tidewater was
an older, more settled region, and its citizens wanted little
government interference; Piedmont people, on the other hand,
looked to government for protection along the frontier, for ready
money and light taxation.
Under the Articles of Confederation, adopted while
the American Revolution was still being fought, sovereignty
rested with the states, and they gave very limited powers to
a weak central administration. With the adoption (1787) and ratification
of the federal Constitution, however, strong national government
began in America.
It is probably safe to say however, that there were
two main issues/causes of the war between the states:
"State's Rights"
and "Slavery"
By early 1861, just before the outbreak of the Civil
War, serious economic and ideological differences -among them
states' rights and slavery- divided
the people of the young nation. These differences also divided
the country geographically. Nineteen states, including the industrialized
northern states, prohibited slavery, while fifteen southern states,
whose economies depended on agriculture, permitted the ownership
of slaves. Eleven of the southern states withdrew from the Union
and formed the Confederate States of America.
The chief and immediate cause of the war was slavery.
Southern states, including the 11 states that formed the Confederacy,
depended on slavery to support their economy. Southerners used
slave labor to produce crops, especially cotton.
Although slavery was illegal in the Northern states, only a small
proportion of Northerners actively opposed it.
The main debate between the North and the South on
the eve of the war was whether slavery should be permitted in
the Western territories recently acquired during the Mexican
War (1846-1848), including New Mexico, part of California, and
Utah. Opponents of slavery were concerned about its expansion,
in part because they did not want to compete against slave labor.
~ Economic and Social Factors
~
By 1860, the North and the South had developed into
two very different regions. Divergent social, economic, and political
points of view, dating from colonial times, gradually drove the
two sections farther and farther apart. Each tried to impose
its point of view on the country as a whole. Although compromises
had kept the Union together for many years, in 1860 the situation
was explosive. The election of Abraham
Lincoln as president was viewed by the South as a threat
to slavery and ignited the war.
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During the first half of the 19th century, economic differences
between the regions also increased. By 1860 cotton
was the chief crop of the South, and it represented 57 percent
of all U.S. exports. The profitability of cotton, known as 'King Cotton,' completed the South's dependence
on the plantation system and its essential component, slavery. |
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The North was by then firmly established as an industrial
society. Labor was needed, but not slave labor. Immigration was
encouraged. Immigrants from Europe worked in factories, built
the railroads of the North, and settled the West. Very few settled
in the South.
The South, resisting industrialization, manufactured little.
Almost all manufactured goods had to be imported. Southerners
therefore opposed high tariffs, or taxes that were placed on
imported goods and increased the price of manufactured articles.
The manufacturing economy of the North, on the other hand, demanded
high tariffs to protect its own products from cheap foreign competition.
Before the Civil War, the federal government's chief source of
revenue was the tariff. There were few other sources of
revenue, for example, since neither personal nor corporate income
taxes existed. The tariff paid for most improvements made by
the federal government, such as roads, turnpikes, and canals.
To keep tariffs low, the South preferred to do without these
improvements.
Taxes plagued federal-state-citizen relationships
throughout the first half of the 1800s. The first protective
tariff in 1789 brought the earliest of many clashes between Northern
and Southern economic views. Southern producers wanted
a tariff on hemp; Northern users wanted none. Gradually
tariff arguments pitted Northern manufacturing interests
and small farmers against Southern planters and
slaveholders.
Despite being Vice President (under President Andrew
Jackson) John C. Calhoun wrote the
"South Carolina Exposition and Protest," which the
South Carolina legislature adopted (in 1828) as its manifesto
against bad federal laws. In it, Calhoun ingeniously claimed
the right of states to nullify federal laws that they
deemed unconstitutional. The "Nullification" controversy
came to a head in 1832 when South Carolina declared the tariff
laws null and void and President Jackson responded with the threat
of force. By this time Calhoun had resigned the vice-presidency
and became a South Carolina senator. His theories of government
helped shape South Carolina's views, and at length he devised
a theory of secession that prescribed the steps for leaving the
Union. Although a compromise solution to this particular crisis
was found, Calhoun's ideas were to be invoked again in 1861.
The expanding Northwest Territory, which was made up of the present-day
states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part
of Minnesota, was far from the markets for its grain and cattle.
It needed such internal improvements for survival, and so supported
the Northeast's demands for high tariffs. In return, the Northeast
supported most federally financed improvements in the Northwest
Territory.
As a result, although both the South and the West were agricultural,
the West allied itself with the
Northern, rather than the Southern, point of view.
Economic needs sharpened sectional differences, adding to the
interregional hostility.
~ Slavery and Territorial
Expansion ~
Politics and economics conspired against the Union
in the next 30 years. Politics became inextricably mixed with
the slavery issue in the years after the "Missouri Compromise"
(1820-21), by which Maine entered the Union as a free state and
Missouri as a slave state, but slavery was forbidden in the rest
of the Louisiana Purchase territory north of 36 deg 30' north
latitude. Southern leaders feared their power in the House of
Representatives would dwindle as new free states were created.
They resisted in the Senate by calling for a Southern slave state
to balance every Northern free one and by upholding the ideas
of state sovereignty and the sanctity of private property--even
slaves. |
