American Civil War

Causes

At the center of the controversy was the issue of slavery and its expansion into the Northern and Western territories that were acquired as a result of the Mexican American War from 1846 to 1848. In addition, the 11 Southern states that would ultimately make up the Confederacy felt that the enslavement of Africans was a vital part of their economy and especially essential in the growth and exportation of cotton. Northern economic interests, which mostly depended on manufacturing and did not require slave labor, were affected because the South, which had to import its own products from abroad, favored lower tariffs on imported goods. This meant that the North faced competition against cheap foreign imports. Moreover, those tariffs helped pay for the improvement of roads and the expansion of railroads, as well as for expansion of the Northwest territories of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

As the United States began to expand thanks to both the Mexican War and the Louisiana Purchase, the question of slavery in the newly acquired territories produced a firestorm of controversy. In 1818, Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, which allowed Missouri to be admitted into the union as a slave state, so long as slavery was not included in the newly organized territories and above the line 36º30′N latitude. That quelled the dispute over slavery until 1850, when Congress voted to admit California as a state, but in the Compromise of 1850 stipulated that people in the territories seized during the Mexican War be allowed to decide for themselves whether or not they would allow slavery. When Congress decided to organize the territories in Kansas and Nebraska, it passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed settlers to extend slavery into the newly acquired territories. The passage of this act plunged the Kansas territory into a 4-year cycle of violence during which the state came to be known as “Bloody Kansas.” Although the antislavery proponents eventually won their fight to keep slavery out of the territory, it added to an already embittered rivalry between the North and the South.