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The fight between slaves and non-slave state
This issue led to the disruption of the union. It was the debate over the future of slavery. That dispute led to secession, and secession brought about a war in which the Northern and Western states. The territories fought to preserve the Union, and the South fought to establish Southern independence as a new confederation of states under its own constitution. -
The States Rights
State Rights refers to the struggle between the federal government and individual states over political power. In the Civil War, this struggle focused heavily on the institution of slavery and whether the federal government had the right to regulate or even abolish slavery within an individual state. -
Economic and social differences between the North and the South
The cotton machine was able to reduce the time it took to separate seeds from the cotton. At the same time the increase in the number of plantations willing to move from other crops to cotton meant the greater need for a large amount of cheap labor slaves. -
The Underground Railroad
Some abolitionists actively helped runaway slaves to escape on the Underground Railroad, and there were instances in which men, even lawmen, sent to retrieve runaways were attacked and beaten by abolitionist mobs. To the slave holding states, this meant Northerners wanted to choose which parts of the Constitution they would enforce, while expecting the South to honor the entire document. -
Southern Secession
South Carolina had threatened in the 1830s during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, over a tariff that benefited Northern manufacturers but increased the cost of goods in the South. Jackson had vowed to send an army to force the state to stay in the Union, and Congress authorized him to raise such an army -
Growth of the Abolition Movement
Increasingly, the northerners became more polarized against slavery. Sympathies began to grow for abolitionists and against slavery and slaveholders. -
The Missouri Compromise
In the Missouri Compromise the abolitionists fought to have slavery declared illegal in those territories, as the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had done in the territory that became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. Advocates of slavery feared that if the institution were prohibited in any states carved out of the new territories the political power of slaveholding states would be diminished, possibly to the point of slavery being outlawed everywhere within the United -
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabins was published in serial form in an anti-slavery newspaper in 1851 and in book format in 1852. Within two years it was a nationwide and worldwide bestseller. Depicting the evils of slavery, it offered a vision of slavery that few in the nation had seen before. -
The election of Abraham Lincoln
Even though things were already coming to a head, when Lincoln was elected in 1860, South Carolina issued its Declaration of the Causes of Secession. They believed that Lincoln was anti-slavery and in favor of Northern interests. -
Fort Sumter
On April 10, 1861, knowing that resupplies were on their way from the North to the federal garrison at Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, provisional Confederate forces in Charleston demanded the fort’s surrender. The fort’s commander, Major Robert Anderson, refused. On April 12, the Confederates opened fire with cannons. At 2:30 p.m. the following day, Major Anderson surrendered.
