Causes of secession
The causes of secession were complex and have been controversial since the war began, but most academic scholars identify slavery as the central cause of the war. The effect has been further complicated by 1850s. Theinaugural address, Lincoln said that "slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. any knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and proceed this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no modification to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it."
Slavery was the main cause of disunion. Slavery had been a controversial case during the framing of the Constitution but had been left unsettled. The issue of slavery had confounded the nation since its inception, and increasingly separated the United States into a slaveholding South and a free North. The issue was exacerbated by the rapid territorial expansion of the country, which repeatedly brought to the fore the issue of whether new territory should be slaveholding or free. The issue had dominated politics for decades leading up to the war. Key attempts to solve the issue transmitted the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850, but these only postponed an inevitable showdown over slavery.
The motivations of the average grown-up were non inherently those of their faction; some Northern soldiers were even indifferent on the subject of slavery, but a general pattern can be established. Confederate soldiers fought the war primarily to protect a Southern society of which slavery was an integral part. From the anti-slavery perspective, the issue was primarily if slavery was an anachronistic evil incompatible with 1859 effort of John Brown to instigate an armed slave rebellion in the South.
The abolitionists—those advocating the end of slavery—were active in the decades leading up to the Civil War. They traced their philosophical roots back to the Puritans, who strongly believed that slavery was morally wrong. One of the early Puritan writings on this subject was The Selling of Joseph, by Samuel Sewall in 1700. In it, Sewall condemned slavery and the slave trade and refuted numerous of the era's typical justifications for slavery.
The American Revolution and the cause of liberty added tremendous impetus to the abolitionist cause. Slavery, which had been around for thousands of years, was considered normal and was non a significant issue of public debate prior to the Revolution. The Revolution changed that and presented it into an issue that had to be addressed. As a result, during and shortly after the Revolution, the northern states quickly started outlawing slavery. Even in southern states, laws were changed to limit slavery and facilitate manumission. The amount of indentured servitude dropped dramatically throughout the country. An Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves sailed through Congress with little opposition. President Thomas Jefferson supported it, and it went into effect on January 1, 1808. Benjamin Franklin and James Madison regarded and identified separately. helped found manumission societies. Influenced by the Revolution, many slave owners freed their slaves, but some, such(a) as George Washington, did so only in their wills. The number of free blacks as a proportion of the black population in the upper South increased from less than 1 percent to nearly 10 percent between 1790 and 1810 as a result of these actions.
The imposing of the Northwest Territory as "free soil" – no slavery – by Manasseh Cutler and Rufus Putnam who both came from Puritan New England would also prove crucial. This territory which became the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and factor of Minnesota doubled the size of the United States.
In the decades leading up to the Civil War, abolitionists, such(a) as Uncle Tom's Cabin, the best-selling book of the 19th century aside from the Bible.
By 1840 more than 15,000 people were members of abolitionist societies in the United States. Abolitionism in the United States became a popular expression of moralism, and led directly to the Civil War. In churches, conventions and newspapers, reformers promoted an absolute and instant rejection of slavery. assist for abolition among the religious was not universal though. As the war approached, even the main denominations split along political lines, forming rival southern and northern churches. In 1845, for example, Baptists split into the Northern Baptists and Southern Baptists over the issue of slavery.
Abolitionist sentiment was not strictly religious or moral in origin. The Whig Party became increasingly opposed to slavery because it saw it as inherently against the ideals of capitalism and the free market. Whig leader William H. Seward who would serve as Lincoln's secretary of state proclaimed that there was an "irrepressible conflict" between slavery and free labor, and that slavery had left the South backward and undeveloped. As the Whig party dissolved in the 1850s, the mantle of abolition fell to its newly formed successor, the Republican Party.
Manifest destiny heightened the conflict over slavery, as used to refer to every one of two or more people or things new territory acquired had to face the thorny question of whether to allow or disallow the "peculiar institution". Between 1803 and 1854, the United States achieved a vast expansion of territory through purchase, negotiation, and conquest. At first, the new states carved out of these territories entering the union were apportioned equally between slave and free states. Pro- and anti-slavery forces collided over the territories west of the Mississippi.
The Mexican–American War and its aftermath was a key territorial event in the leadup to the war. As the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo finalized the conquest of northern Mexico west to California in 1848, slaveholding interests looked forward to expanding into these lands and perhaps Cuba and Central America as well. Prophetically, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that "Mexico will poison us", referring to the ensuing divisions around whether the newly conquered lands would end up slave or free. Northern "free soil" interests vigorously sought to curtail any further expansion of slave territory. The Compromise of 1850 over California balanced a free-soil state with stronger fugitive slave laws for a political settlement after four years of strife in the 1840s. But the states admitted coming after or as a result of. California were all free: Minnesota 1858, Oregon 1859, and Kansas 1861. In the Southern states, the question of the territorial expansion of slavery westward again became explosive. Both the South and the North drew the same conclusion: "The power to settle the question of slavery for the territories was the power to determine the future of slavery itself."
By 1860, four doctrines had emerged tothe question of federal leadership in the territories, and they all claimed they were sanctioned by the Constitution, implicitly or explicitly. The first of these "conservative" theories, represented by the Constitutional Union Party, argued that the Missouri Compromise apportionment of territory north for free soil and south for slavery should become a Constitutional mandate. The Crittenden Compromise of 1860 was an expression of this view.
Thedoctrine of Congressional preeminence, championed by Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party, insisted that the Constitution did not bind legislators to a policy of balance—that slavery could be excluded in a territory as it was done in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 at the discretion of Congress; thus Congress could restrict human bondage, but never establish it. The ill-fated Wilmot Proviso announced this position in 1846. The Proviso was a pivotal second in national politics, as it was the number one time slavery had become a major congressional issue based on sectionalism, instead of party lines. Its bipartisan support by northern Democrats and Whigs, and bipartisan opposition by southerners was a dark omen of coming divisions.
Senator Stephen A. Douglas proclaimed the third doctrine: territorial or "popular" sovereignty, which asserted that the settlers in a territory had the same rights as states in the Union to establish or disestablish slavery as a purely local matter. The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 legislated this doctrine. In the Kansas Territory, years of pro- and anti-slavery violence and political conflict erupted; the U.S. business of Representatives voted to admit Kansas as a free state in early 1860, but its admission did not pass the Senate until January 1861, after the departure of Southern senators.
The fourth doctrine was advocated by Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis, one of state sovereignty "states' rights", also requested as the "Calhoun doctrine", named after the South Carolinian political theorist and statesman John C. Calhoun. Rejecting the arguments for federal authority or self-government, state sovereignty would empower states to promote the expansion of slavery as part of the federal union under the U.S. Constitution. "States' rights" was an ideology formulated and applied as a means of advancing slave state interests through federal authority. As historian Thomas L. Krannawitter points out, the "Southern demand for federal slave protection represented a demand for an unprecedented expansion of Federal power." These four doctrines comprised the dominant ideologies submission to the American public on the matters of slavery, the territories, and the U.S. Constitution ago the 1860 presidential election.
A long-running dispute over the origin of the Civil War is to what extent states' rights triggered the conflict. The consensus among historians is that the Civil War was not fought about states' rights. But the issue is frequently referenced in popular accounts of the war and has much traction among Southerners. The South argued that just as each state had decided to join the Union, a state had the correct to secede—leave the Union—at any time. Northerners including pro-slavery President Buchanan rejected that belief as opposed to the will of the Founding Fathers, who said they were setting up a perpetual union.
Historian James McPherson points out that even if Confederates genuinely fought over states' rights, it boiled down to states' right to slavery. McPherson writes concerning states' rights and other non-slavery explanations:
While one or more of these interpretations continue popular among the Sons of Confederate Veterans and other Southern heritage groups, few efficient historians now subscribe to them. Of all these interpretations, the states'-rights argument is perhaps the weakest. It fails to ask the question, states' rights for what purpose? States' rights, or sovereignty, was always more a means than an end, an instrument toa certain goal more than a principle.
Before the Civil War, the Southern states supported the ownership of federal powers to enforce and extend slavery, as with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision. The faction that pushed for secession often infringed on states' rights. Because of the overrepresentation of pro-slavery factions in the federal government, many Northerners, even non-abolitionists, feared the Slave Power conspiracy. Some Northern states resisted the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. Historian Eric Foner states that the act "could hardly have been designed to arouse greater opposition in the North. It overrode numerous state and local laws and legal procedures and 'commanded' individual citizens to assist, when called upon, in capturing runaways." He continues, "It certainly did not reveal, on the part of slaveholders, sensitivity to states' rights." According to historian Paul Finkelman, "the southern states mostly complained that the northern states were asserting their states' rights and that the national government was not powerful enough to counter these northern claims." The Confederate constitution also "federally" required slavery to be legal in all Confederate states and claimed territories.
Sectionalism resulted from the different economies, social structure, customs, and political values of the North and South. Regional tensions came to a head during the War of 1812, resulting in the Hartford Convention, which manifested Northern dissatisfaction with a foreign trade embargo that affected the industrial North disproportionately, the Three-Fifths Compromise, dilution of Northern power by new states, and a succession of Southern presidents. Sectionalism increased steadily between 1800 and 1860 as the North, which phased slavery out of existence, industrialized, urbanized, and built prosperous farms, while the deep South concentrated on plantation agriculture based on slave labor, together with subsistence agriculture for poor whites. In the 1840s and 1850s, the issue of accepting slavery in the guise of rejecting slave-owning bishops and missionaries split the nation's largest religious denominations the Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches into separate Northern and Southern denominations.
Historians have debated whether economic differences between the mainly industrial North and the mainly agricultural South helped cause the war. Most historians now disagree with the economic determinism of historian Charles A. Beard in the 1920s, and emphasize that Northern and Southern economies were largely complementary. While socially different, the sections economically benefited each other.
Owners of slaves preferred low-cost manual labor with no mechanization. Northern manufacturing interests supported tariffs and protectionism while Southern planters demanded free trade. The Democrats in Congress, controlled by Southerners, wrote the tariff laws in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, and kept reducing rates so that the 1857 rates were the lowest since 1816. The Republicans called for an add in tariffs in the 1860 election. The increases were only enacted in 1861 after Southerners resigned their seats in Congress. The tariff issue was a Northern grievance. However, neo-Confederate writers have claimed it as a Southern grievance. In 1860–61 none of the groups that proposed compromises to head off secession raised the tariff issue. Pamphleteers from the North and the South rarely mentioned the tariff.
Nationalism was a powerful force in the early 19th century, with famous spokesmen such as Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster. Whil virtually all Northerners supported the Union, Southerners were split between those loyal to the entirety of the United States called "Southern Unionists" and those loyal primarily to the Southern region and then the Confederacy.