Slavery and the Civil War

How did the issue of slavery lead to the Civil War? How did slavery change during the antebellum period? How did westward expansion produce sectional conflicts between North and South?

Tensions between the north and the south were at a peak when war finally broke out between them, and the issue that caused most of the tension was slavery. The ideologies of the north had shifted so far from those of the south that they now viewed each other as bitter enemies, each threatening the other’s way of life. For the north, the system they favored was free labor, for the south it was slavery.

Slavery had become a much more profitable enterprise in the early 19^th century. The invention of the cotton gin meant a slave could now produce 50 times more cotton per day than they had previously done. This coincided with an increased demand for cotton, as the textile industries in the north and overseas took off. Cotton plantation owners were making a fortune, and the two things they needed in order to keep it up were slaves and land. The Louisiana Purchase provided the land – the Missouri Compromise was struck, and southern plantation owners now had more land to move into. An internal slave trade began when the African slave trade was banned, and tobacco crops in the east began to fail. Slaves were being sold in markets, chained together and made to walk sometimes hundreds of miles to their new master’s plantations. This was the first time many people had witnessed the brutality of slavery, and it helped to fuel abolitionist thinking.

Since the south was making so much money off the labor of their slaves, they were all the more determined to keep slavery legal and to push for its expansion into new territories. Meanwhile, the north was gradually phasing slavery out, and was beginning to think of itself as a free society. Trade and industry in the north had become much more diverse than in the south, which relied heavily on slave labor. Although there were plenty of active abolitionists in the north, many northerners didn’t oppose slavery on moral grounds, but did so because they resented competing with slave labor for land and work. There were a variety of political parties in the north, most tended to be anti-slavery because they had an interest in keeping policies in place that would benefit northern industry and free labor, not necessarily in ending slavery in the south. They did oppose the expansion of slavery into new states, though, as the balance between slave and free states was delicate and they didn’t want the south to get a majority in Congress.

The acquisition of new land after the Mexican war brought the issue of slavery to the fore once more. The Compromise of 1850 left northerners feeling stung because it seemed to give too much away to the pro-slavery states. Then the Kansas-Nebraska Act declared that the status of these territories should be decided by the states themselves (known as popular sovereignty). This enraged northerners, as a vote like that would almost certainly go to the pro-slavery side. (It also broke the Missouri Compromise deal). 

 





 When the elections were flooded by pro-slavery votes from Missouri, the president allowed it, and a mini civil war broke out in Kansas between pro- and anti-slavery mobs – known as Bleeding Kansas. Congress was also bitterly divided, with violence breaking out there too. This lead to an extreme split in the nation’s politics – the Whigs, the Free-Soilers and the Know Nothings all dissolved, and the northern Democrats deserted the party. A new northern party – the Republicans – emerged. The south remained faithful to the Democrats, and the division ran strictly along sectional lines.

The wedge between the north and the south was driven deeper by the Dred Scott decision, which effectively made slavery legal everywhere in the Union, and by the north’s adoption of John Brown as a martyred hero, after his attack on Harper’s Ferry, and his subsequent execution.  By the time the first shot was fired at Fort Sumter, north and south were as ideologically opposed as they could be on the controversial subject of slavery, and its expansion.