Slavery: The Only Cause Of The Civil War

Albert Dietrich once wrote, “There are perhaps many causes worth dying for, but to me, certainly, there are none worth killing for” (36). When many think of what caused the Civil War, the first thing that pops into their head is slavery. This is what they teach us in elementary school. Every kid is taught about the North, the South, slavery, and Abraham Lincoln, but there was so much more to the Civil War than what was taught back then. First, slavery was not the only cause of the Civil War. There were many other issues besides slavery that had equal if not more influence on the start of the war. Two of these additional causes of the war, which began tensions between these two sides long before slavery, were politics and the economy. Politics
are and have always been a source of conflict for any nation big or small. In the case of the United States during the Civil War, those who sided with the Confederacy tended to agree with the ideas of the Democratic Party and those who sided with the Union tended to agree more with the ideas of the Whig/ Republican Party. One of the differences that these opposing sides disagreed on was the issue of where the power of the government should lie, an issue that goes all the way back to the founding of the nation. The Confederacy believed that the states should have the power, an idea we still see with many states today.
They believed that the central government should not be able to make laws that affect every state. Each state should have be able to make their own laws and be able to govern themselves, in the opinion of the Confederacy. This is why when they thought their constitutional rights were being violated and slavery was coming to an end, they decided to secede from the union. They believed that if they seceded that they could govern themselves and the state would have control. This can be seen in that after they seceded each state had its own standing army rather than one with contributions from each state (Conradofontanilla. "Political and Economic Causes of the American Civil War."). On the opposite side were those in the Union. They believed that there should be a strong centralized government to keep the Union together and in sync. They viewed the nation as one big state rather than a bunch of states forced to cooperate under one leader as the south did. Due to this fact, Abraham Lincoln had never originally planned to end slavery. He believed that the Constitution did not provide the federal government with the authority to end slavery (05/31/13, Eric Black). He
saw how the Union was threatening to break apart and did not want or plan to jeopardize that. However, his personal dislike of slavery was well known during his run for president in 1860. Therefore, when the Republicans, led by Abraham Lincoln, won the 1860 election, the Confederacy saw this as a sign that slavery was over and the Republicans were going to outlaw slavery throughout the nation. Thus began the series of states seceding from the Union. First South Carolina, then Mississippi and it just kept going from there. With the threat of slavery coming to an end and their dislike of a strong central which controlled the states, there were more than enough political stressors to make them ready to leave the Union at the drop of a hat. The other issue that helped in the start of the Civil War was economics.
In the Union their economy was mainly dependent on industry. Due to this many of their cities and factories were connected by railroads. With their economy so heavily riding on factories and immigrant workers they had no need for slaves and by the time of the Civil War slavery had died off there for the most part. Due to this fact they felt that slavery was an unnecessary construct. Walt Whitman who worked as a nurse during the Civil War, wrote a poem that greatly reflected the idealistic nature of the North “I Hear America Singing” in which he goes through the jobs of people in the North and how he hears them “sing”. He mentions mechanics, a mason, a carpenter and many more, however never once mentions slaves or the fact that had only two years earlier been in a horrific war that threatened to tear the nation apart (Whitman 260). The Confederacy was almost the exact opposite when it came their economy. The economy of the South mainly relied on agriculture. In fact, their main crop was cotton. They believed themselves so secure with this crop as their mainstay that they actually referred to it as “King Cotton”. Even with their economic boom beginning to slow down in 1860 and the North’s holding steady, they believed that all they needed was the cotton to get them through. The only problem was that they needed the industry in the North to refine and transport the cotton. The North had trains and other
means to transport the cotton to buyers and due to the fact that the agriculture economy was booming, investors of the South felt no need to look elsewhere (Midterm, 3). This hurt them when they left the Union because while they had a product that people wanted, they had no way of shipping or selling it because they had never thought to develop industry of their own. Also, due to the “King Cotton Theory”, when the country started to heading toward war, they believed that they would have no problems. They believed that because they had a product that the European countries wanted that they would get support from them when war finally erupted. However, no country felt the need to intervene. Without their ability to transport the cotton the Southern economy suffered. Those European countries who had been buying from the South found new suppliers who had the industry and ability to deliver the goods they wanted. In the case of the U.S. Civil War, war definitely could have been avoided. Had Jefferson decided, before the South came to rely on it so heavily, to ban slavery, it would not have gotten to be such a heated topic. There were many opportunities for the nation to stop slavery before it became so heavily relied on by the South. However, this is not the only way that the Civil War could have been prevented. Had there not been so many other stressor pressuring these two sides to go to war, the South would not have been so quickly to believe the worst and start seceding when Lincoln was elected. With the economic and political differences pushing down on them, all they were waiting for was one more thing to push them over the edge and when Lincoln was elected and they just assumed he was going to put an end to slavery, they found it. He never would have put an end to slavery if the South hadn’t decided to secede and the civil war hadn’t started. He wanted to keep the union together and he knew that if he did that, he would be tearing it apart. In the end, no one will ever know if the Civil War could have been prevented. There are many things people think of now that they believe could have stopped it, but there is no way to know for sure that those things would have worked. Altogether, it helped the nation to grow. Though there are still arguments and debates over economics and politics, the U.S. is and has been able to put those issues aside and put more focus on staying and standing united. The nation needed to figure out who it was and what it stood for. If it had happened any later or any earlier in its conception it would have crumbled. Though the Civil War was the bloodiest battle in American history it defined the U.S. as a nation and it is stronger because of it. Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, “Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists” ("Quotes About America (1148 quotes).").