The Civil War: The Cause Of Slavery

When examining the Civil War, many causes of conflict are often overlooked by the obvious cause of slavery. While slavery was somewhat of a cause of the war, it definitely wasn’t a big reason and makes the key reasons of conflict seem very small and dismal. There were many more causes to the Civil War like some that will be mentioned in this essay. The Civil War was not fought solely to end slavery and free the slaves. First, slavery was more of a symbol then a reason of conflict in the Civil War. The South was completely devoted to an agrarian plantation economy, relying heavily on the farming of cotton to stimulate the economy. The North however, was going in a much different direction. They were relying on industrialization and a high number of immigrants from European countries to build up industries. By doing this, the North was gaining control of the government and killing the South’s efforts to maintain a balanced government. Also, after the Mexican/American War, the Missouri Compromise went into effect allowing slavery in western territories. Furthermore, the South felt that the slaves were more property than anything. They said that the federal government was prohibited by the tenth amendment by basically taking away the right to take
their “property” to another territory. The election of 1860 was another cause of the Civil War.
During the election, the South was concerned about complete control of the government by Free states. Furthermore, when Abraham Lincoln won the election by a large margin, South Carolina was unhappy with the Union and opened a convention so they could attempt to secede from the Union. Within a short amount of time, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas followed. To the South, Lincoln was considered a “Black Republican”. It was said that after Lincoln won the election, he inherited a collapsing nation on the brink of war. That was indeed the case as war broke out less than a year later and thus started the most famous war in American
History. The last cause of the war was unfair taxation put on the South by the North. Since the South relied so heavily on their crops to be a successful society, when the North put heavy taxes on them, it crippled production. The South was using their immense production of cotton as the crutch to keep them upright. They traded the cotton to European countries in return for goods. The North, being an industry based economy, taxed these goods heavily so the South was forced to buy from them since they could not afford to trade with Europe. At one point, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia paid 75 percent of all Federal taxes. This was allowed to happen by the harsh tariffs put on the South and was just one more way to upset the south and make them want to go to war. This was also some of the many unfair taxes that the government put on southern states. The South was basically being put into a depression by all the taxes they had to pay while the North’s economy was flourishing with the industrial boom it was experiencing. As you can clearly see, the Civil War was clearly caused by much more then slavery. Slavery was more of a symbol. The real main causes were the election of 1860 and the unfair, brutal taxes put on the South by the government. All the problems were significant in the cause of one of the most bloody and brutal wars in the history of the United States.