to rebel and fight for what they thought was right. The North started noticing more and more just how terrible owning another human being as property was, but the South saw it as something completely different. Actually, the South began to see slavery as a good thing and that they were helping the slaves because slave owners provided shelter and food. Revolts began in correspondence to the South not registering that what they were doing was wrong. Nat Turner’s, an educated and religion man, rebellion was one of the most well known rebellions because it lead to laws restricting religious assemblies for slaves and teaching slaves to read and write. His bloody revolt, along with others, instilled a lot of fear into the South. The Fugitive Slave Act was a law that was part of the Compromise of 1850. It created a new set of federal agents to help track runaway slaves and required authorities in the North to assist Southern slave catchers and return runaway slaves to their owners. This law angered many northerners and caused even more hostility between the North and South.
Popular sovereignty was a solution to the slavery crisis suggested by Lewis Cass of Michigan by which territorial residents would decide slavery’s fate in any proposed new state. The idea of popular sovereignty was a disaster waiting to happen because it would obviously cause fighting between proslavery and antislavery citizens within the same state, and it definitely did. It led to the Kansas-Nebraska Act which then led to Bleeding Kansas. The Kansas territory became a battlefield between proslavery and antislavery advocates and no matter what side you’re looking from, Bleeding Kansas was one of the first major causes of the Civil War.
The South seceding was the last straw before the Civil War broke out. Abraham Lincoln’s election was what initiated the secession because southerners saw Lincoln being president as a symbol for slavery ending. Although Lincoln said that he would not abolish slavery where it had already existed, the South still decided to separate. Problems like this are still happening today. In fact, Texas may be making a move to secede from the United States and become its own republic.
All of the situations leading up to the war and the effects of the war severely affected both sides. There were an abundance amount of reasons and a great deal of people who contributed to the uprise of the war but the primary reasons were slavery and slave revolts, popular sovereignty, and the secession of the South. All of these events, slavery, popular sovereignty, and the South’s secession were the prominent causes of the Civil War and they all show that the South was the aggressor of the war.