Secession And Civil War Essay

Abraham Lincoln said they did not have the right to leave the United States and sent in troops to stop the South from leaving.

Abraham Lincoln said they did not have the right to leave the United States and sent in troops to stop the South from leaving. The Civil War was by far the most catastrophic event to ever happen in the American South.Slavery At the heart of much of the South's issues was slavery.

In 1854, the government passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act allowing the residents of Kansas to vote on whether they would be a slave state or a free state.

The region was flooded with supporters from both sides. Several people were killed in small skirmishes giving the confrontation the name Bleeding Kansas.

For the purposes of this article, let's stipulate that the preservation of slavery and the plantation economy was the primary objective in seceding from the United States.

If that was the point of secession, then the strategy was an obvious disaster.

The southern states felt that the federal government was taking away their rights and powers.

Expansion As the United States continued to expand westward, each new state added to the country shifted the power between the North and the South.The proximate cause of the South's secession was the election of Abraham Lincoln with a Republican majority in 1860.However, in and of itself, secession was a major overreaction to this political setback.Many people in the North believed that slavery was wrong and evil. They wanted slavery made illegal throughout the United States.Abolitionists such as John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Harriet Beecher Stowe began to convince more and more people of the evil of slavery.The southern states felt that Lincoln was against slavery and also against the South.Secession When Lincoln was elected, many of the southern states decided they no longer wanted to be a part of the United States. Starting with South Carolina, eleven states would eventually leave the United States and form a new country called the Confederate States of America.States' Rights The idea of states' rights was not new to the Civil War.Since the Constitution was first written there had been arguments about how much power the states should have versus how much power the federal government should have.Below we will discuss some of these differences and how they created a divide between the North and the South that eventually caused the Civil War. Farming In the mid-1800s, the economies of many northern states had moved away from farming to industry.A lot of people in the North worked and lived in large cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.