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Essay on Causes of American Civil War
What caused the American Civil War? It is amazing that even today, over 130 years after the Civil War started, there is passionate debate regarding the cause of the Civil War. It is a fact that when the armies for the North and South were first formed, only a small minority of the soldiers on either side would have declared that the reason they joined the army was to fight either for or against slavery.However, equally true is the statement had there been no slavery, there would have been no war. Had there been no moral condemnation of slavery, there would have been no war. The message here is that the reasons a nation goes to war are usually various and complicated. The American Civil War is no exception.
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” (Faust, 2004), 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.
The curious thing is that although slavery was the moral issue of the nineteenth century that divided the political leaders of the land, the average American had very little interest in slaves or slavery. Most Southerners were small farmers that could not afford slaves. Most Northerners were small farmers or tradesmen that had never even seen a slave......
