Talk:Origins of the American Civil War/Origins of the American Civil War

The origins of the American Civil War lay in the complex problems of slavery, expansion, sectionalism, parties, and politics of the antebellum era prior to the American Civil War. Economic and social changes based on the concepts of free labor in the north and on slave labor in the South led to two distinct and conflicting visions of American society.

As territorial expansion forced the United States to confront the question of whether new areas of settlement were to be slave or free, as the power of the slaveholders in national politics waned, and as the North and the South developed starkly divergent economies and societies, the divisive issues of sectionalism catapulted the nation into a civil war after a president was elected who was very objectionable to slave-owing interests.

Cultural divergences and the rise of anti-slavery

Main article: Cultural divergences and the rise of anti-slavery before the American Civil War

Northern society went through a number of changes that allowed for the eventual development of a an anti-slavery movement in the 1830s and 1840s. Industrialization, urbanization reformism all played a part. A side effect was the creation of new social institutions and streamlining old ones such as economic reforms and a switch from labor-intensive toward capital-intensive production. The Industrial Revolution also had its effect as well as a steady increase in social mobility and increased pressure for social reform. Jacksonian democracy and the concept of "free labor" whereby the individual had control of their own ability to produce products, were outgrowths of this trend.

The perception of slavery by northern activists at the time were inspired at first by Yankee Protestantism and the Second Great Awakening. The second quarter of the 19th century saw a shift toward wanting to transform individuals through discipline. Thus poverty was seen as a result of bad character and slavery as a lack of control over one's own destiny and labor. To be truly free, the antebellum reformers thought, one had to restrain oneself. Prevailing abolitionist sentiment, therefore, viewed those who advocated for the rights of the working class with scorn while at the same time they despised slaveholders. They did, however, often advocate for prisons and asylums, temperance, and relief for the "deserving poor." Those who were "undeserving" were often Irish or German Catholic immigrants.

The expansion of the factory system marginalized craftsman and artisans while advancements in transportation and communication saw the rapid expansion of the population and economy of the Northwest. Better access to export markets increased the social standing of farmers in the region and the small towns and villages that would become the base of the Republican Party prospered. Small-scale capitalism combined with the chance for white Americans to control their labor, climb the social ladder and own property became an increasingly important concept in the north. At the same time, the Free-soil movement and later the Free-Soil party demanded that slavery should not be expanded into territories where it had not yet existed, such as Oregon and the ceded Mexican territory. In the end, ideas which tended to protect the self-interest of northerners had more weight than arguments based on the plight of black slaves in the South.

Sectional tensions and the question of slavery in the West

Main article: Tensions over slavery in the West before the American Civil War

The politicians of the 1850s were acting in a society in which the traditional restraints that suppressed sectional conflict in 1820 and 1850 - the most important of which being the stability of two-party system - were being eroded as this rapid extension of mass democracy went forward in the North. A plethora of new parties emerged and politics became a part of mass culture and entertainment, galvanizing unprecedented voter turnout. Controversy over the so-called Ostend Manifesto (which proposed U.S. annexation of Cuba) and the return of fugitive slaves kept sectional tensions alive in the early fifties, and then in the mid-to-late fifties some astute politicians mobilized support by focusing on the expansion of slavery in the West.

A series of compromises were proposed to quell the divisions, raising the question of whether the tensions of the era were a result of the accidental, unnecessary work of self-interested or fanatical agitators or whether they resulted from an inevitable, irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces. The irrepressible conflict argument gained prominence in the decades immediately following the Civil War, painting it as a stark moral conflict in which the South was to blame as a result of its designs of slave power. The idea of the war as avoidable did not gain ground among historians until the 1920s, when the "revisionists" began to offer new accounts of the prologue to the conflict. More recent studies have emphasized the role of political agitation, with the breakdown of the previous two-party system (in which each party represented a broad coalition of views) giving way to smaller, more intensely ideologous parties.

Slavery in the West

The tensions came to a head over the issue of slavery in the western territories. This issue had been present since the Missouri Compromise of 1820, but the rapid expansion of the territories brought on by of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Webster-Ashburton Treaty brought it to the fore; Northerners and Southerners were in effect coming to define "Manifest Destiny" in different ways, undermining nationalism as a unifying force. Not only did the territorial acquisitions bring up the old issue of upsetting the balance between slave states and free states in the Senate, they also placed the federal government at the center of sectional conflict due to its role in providing territorial governments, displacing the indigenous population and improving communication and transportation between the older states and areas west of the Mississippi. The interest in further settlement was thus one factor serving to strengthen the federal government.

Coming out of the issue of transportation was the Kansas-Nebraska Act, intended to address issues pertaining to the construction of railroads but also produced many immediate, sweeping, and ominous changes. In particular, To garner Southern support, the Kansas-Nebraska Act provided that popular sovereignty, through the territorial legislatures, should decide "all questions pertaining to slavery." This effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise, a measure that many Northerners believed had a special sanctity. The Republican Party grew out of the controversy over the Kansas-Nebraska legislation, representing Northern values and radicalism. In 1855-56 violence erupted in "Bleeding Kansas", pitting Yankee and Missourian settlers against each other over rival land claims. Indignant over the developments in Kansas, the Republicans - the first entirely sectional major party in U.S. history - entered their first presidential campaign.

Although the basis of the conflict in Kansas was not directly related to slavery, the campaign of 1856 was waged almost exclusively on the slavery issue—pitted as a struggle between democracy and aristocracy—focusing on the question of Kansas. The new party rapidly developed a powerful partisan culture, and energetically cultivated armies of activists driving voters to the polls in unprecedented numbers.