How Did The South Lead To The Civil War

A great number of accumulated differences between the North and the South led to the Civil War in the USA. The two parts of the country were developing at a different speed in the first half of 19th century, leading to a disparity in their economic situations as well as their social, cultural and political beliefs. While it is true that the US Civil War was triggered off by the issue of slavery, it would still be unfair to say that this phenomenon was the only cause of this war. However, slavery was the burning issue and the primary cause of the economic differences throughout the country, which eventually prevailed and led to a bloody conflict.
In economic terms, the North and the South developed differently due to many factors, including
Slave and land ownership became more concentrated, so more and more white people were forced to leave the land and move to urban centers in search of work. By 1860s a sharp contrast between the developed North and the rural South developed.
Similarly to the economic growth, the period from 1820 to 1840 was a time of significant political developments. The previous qualifications for voting rights by the amount of property owned were abolished and a direct methods of selecting presidential electors, county officials, state judges, and governors replaced indirect methods. These steps lead to a greater number of citizens interested in voting in elections. A new two-party system developed. A very important political figure of this era was Andrew Jackson, who offered a huge amount of Indian land to white settlers. However, the growing tensions between the North and the South culminated in the presidential election in 1860. Political parties were equally split and were not unified. The Republican Party put forward as their candidate Abraham Lincoln from Illinois, who had a reputation in the North for being a moderate and a Unionist. Nonetheless, a small number of Republicans saw Lincoln
A number of social issues, among which slavery proved to be a significant one, were addressed during the first half of the 19th century. Reformers launched campaigns to reduce drinking, establish prisons, create public schools, educate the deaf and the blind, abolish slavery, and provide equal rights to women. While social reformers aimed at solving the problems of crime and illiteracy by creating prisons, public schools, and asylums for the deaf, the blind, and the mentally ill, the radical ones petitioned to abolish slavery and eliminate racial and gender discrimination and create ideal communities as models for a better world. Abolitionism was a movement to end slavery in any form. As the country was expanding westward, this increased the conflict, because both antislavery Northerners and proslavery Southerners tried to apply their contrasting systems into the same western territories. The Abolitionists’ plan was to stop the expansion of slavery and in that way to gradually abolish it. Slave owners saw this step as a limitation of their constitutional rights. Although slavery had died out in the North and was also fading in the border states and urban areas, it was expanding in highly profitable cotton-growing areas of the South. Politicians tried to resolve this crisis with a series of national compromises that only increased the conflict. This led to the rise of the new