American Civil War

Table of Content

Introduction3

Origins of the Civil War4

Causes of the war4

Effects of the American Civil War5

The Confederate Nation and Confederate Nationalism6

Why Such Bloodletting?7

Foreign Intervention8

Conclusion8

End Notes10

American Civil War

Introduction

American Civil War was fought between 1861 and 1865. The war began because President Abraham Lincoln, elected in 1860, was determined to preserve the Union, which was threatened by the issue of slavery. The North was growing rapidly in wealth and population, and it was clear to the Southern slave states that the North would eventually be strong enough to carry a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. The Republican Party had been formed in 1854 partly to oppose slavery, and so Southern leaders decided that when a Republican President was elected, they should secede from the Union.

Consequently, when Lincoln became President, seven states seceded, formed the Confederate States of America and elected Jefferson Davis as their President. On 12 April 1861 Confederates bombarded Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, one of only two federal properties in the South to remain in Union hands: this marked the start of the Civil War.

The North had by far the greater population (twenty-two million compared with the South's nine million, which included three and a half million slaves) and resources, including most of the nation's mineral wealth, manufacturing, grain and shipping. Cotton was the South's one great asset, which it threw away by forbidding its export in 1861 in order to put pressure on Britain, the main importer of American cotton, to recognize and support the Confederate States. Britain did not comply, and found alternative cotton supplies in India and Egypt. The South had little industry and was dependent on imports from Europe, which the North cut off by blockading the coast.

Origins of the Civil War

Divergent social, economic, and political views gradually drove apart the agricultural Southern slaveholding states and the industrialized Northern Free States in the nineteenth century. Sectional conflict culminated in the civil war in 1861. Continued American expansion in the West risked upsetting the sectional balance in the Senate and caused controversy over the status of new territories. The Republican Party, formed in 1854 out of opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, pledged opposition to the extension of slavery into any new territories. Republican attempts to distance themselves from abolitionism failed to reassure many in the South and following Abraham Lincoln's election as President in 1860, seven Southern states seceded, forming the Confederacy. They were joined by four more when Lincoln, in order to preserve the Union, led what remained of the United States into war.

Causes of the war

By 1860, events of the previous decade had brought differences between Northerners and Southerners to boiling point. When Abraham Lincoln, a Republican opposed to slavery's expansion, won the presidency that year without gaining a single Southern electoral vote, secession fever swept the lower South. Seven Southern states (including South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) left the Union and formed the Confederate States of America within three months of the ...