Wednesday, Nov. 12 - The Civil War - Causes

Objective: After this lesson, you will understand the causes of the United States Civil War.

In the mid-19th century, the U.S. was growing rapidly, but there was a big economic difference existed between the country’s northern and southern regions.

In the North, manufacturing and industry was well established, and agriculture was mostly limited to small-scale farms, while the South’s economy was based on a system of large-scale farming that depended on the labor of Black enslaved people to grow certain crops, especially cotton and tobacco.

Growing abolitionist sentiment in the North after the 1830s and northern opposition to slavery’s extension into the new western territories led many southerners to fear that the existence of slavery in America—and thus the backbone of their economy—was in danger.

In 1854, the U.S. Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which essentially opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict. Opposition to the act in the North led to the formation of the Republican Party, a new political entity based on the principle of opposing slavery’s extension into the western territories. Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 was the final straw, and within three months seven southern states–South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas–had seceded from the United States.

Several events led up to the Civil War

1. Slavery
2. Missouri Compromise
3. Nat Turner’s rebellion
4. Wilmot Proviso
5. Compromise of 1850
6. Uncle Tom’s Cabin
7. Bleeding Kansas
8. Dred Scott Decision
9. Lincoln Douglass debates
10. John Brown’s Raid
11. Abe Lincoln elected