The Civil War And Its Ending Of

Slavery Essay, Research Paper

The Civil War and Its Ending of Slavery

This paper is about the civil war and about how it ended slavery with the

emancipation proclomation. I will also talk abou the physical loses of the war.

The South, overwhelmingly agricultural, produced cash crops such ascotton,

tobacco and sugarcane for export to the North or to Europe, but it depended on

the North for manufactures and for the financial and commercial services

essential to trade. Slaves were the largest single investment in the South, and

the fear of slave unrest ensured the loyalty of nonslaveholders to the economic

and social system.

To maintain peace between the Southern and Northern supporters in the

Democratic and Whig parties, political leaders tried to avoid the slavery

question. But with growing opposition in the North to the extension of slavery

into the new territories, evasion of the issue became increasingly difficult.

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 temporarily settled the issue by establishing

the 36. 30′ parallel as the line separating free and slave territory in the

Louisiana Purchase. Conflict resumed, however, when the United States boundaries

were extended westward to the Pacific. The Compromise Measures of 1850 provided

for the admission of California as a free state and the organization of two new

territories.Utah and New Mexico.from the balance of the land acquired in the

Mexican War. The principle of popular sovereignty would be applied there,

permitting the territorial legislatures to decide the status of slavery when

they applied for statehood.

Despite the Compromise of 1850, conflict persisted. The South had become a

minority section, and its leaders viewed the actions of the U.S. Congress, over

which they had lost control, with growing concern. The Northeast demanded for

its industrial growth a protective tariff, federal subsidies for shipping and

internal improvements, and a sound banking and currency system. The Northwest

looked to Congress for free homesteads and federal aid for its roads and

waterways. The South, however, regarded such measures as discriminatory,

favoring Northern commercial interests, and it found the rise of antislavery

agitation in the North intolerable. Many free states, for example, passed

personal liberty laws in an effort to frustrate enforcement of the Fugitive

Slave Act .

The increasing frequency with which “free soilers,” politicians who argued

that no more slave states should be admitted to the Union, won elective office

in the North also worried Southerners. The issue of slavery expansion erupted

again in 1854, when Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois pushed through

Congress a bill establishing two new territories -Kansas and Nebraska -and

applying to both the principle of popular sovereignty. The Kansas-Nebraska Act,

by voiding the Missouri Compromise, produced a wave of protest in the North,

including the organization of the Republican party. Opposing any further

expansion of slavery, the new party became so strong in the North by 1856 that

it nearly elected its candidate, John C. Fremont, to the presidency. Meanwhile,

in the contest for control of Kansas, Democratic President James Buchanan asked

Congress to admit Kansas to the Union as a slave state, a proposal that

outraged Northerners. Adding to their anger, the U.S. Supreme Court, on March 7,

1857, ruled in the Dred Scott case that the U.S. Constitution gave Congress no

authority to prohibit slavery in the territories. Two years later, on October

16, 1859, John Brown, an uncompromising opponent of slavery, raided the federal

arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virgini , in an attempt to promote a general slave

uprising. That raid, along with Northern condemnation of the Dred Scott decision,

helped to convince Southerners of their growing insecurity within the Union.

In the presidential election of 1860, a split in Democratic party ranks

resulted in the nomination by the Southern wing of John C. Breckinridge of

Kentucky and the nomination by the Northern wing of Stephen Douglas. The newly

formed Constitutional Union party, reflecting the compromise sentiment still

strong in the border states, nominated John Bell of Tennessee. The Republicans

nominated Abraham Lincoln on a platform that opposed the further expansion of

slavery and endorsed a protective tariff, federal subsidies for internal

improvements, and a homestead act. The Democratic split virtually assured

Lincoln’s election, and this in turn convinced the South to make a bid for

independence rather than face political encirclement. By March 1861, when

Lincoln was inaugurated, seven states.South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida,

Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.had adopted ordinances of secession, and

the Confederate States of America, with Jefferson Davis as president, had been

formed.

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