USA History - essay on question

Economies in the North and South and Civil War

The issues that drove America into a Civil War were deeply ingrained in the sectional differences between North and South. The South's agricultural economy was based on cash crops such as tobacco, rice, and cotton that hinged on cheap slave labor. On the other hand, the North developed along commercial and manufacturing lines dependent on free labor(Altman ,20). These differences were manifested in the struggle for political dominance over governmental policy. By and large, the South was able to control the debate, but with the territorial growth of the nation and the subsequent debate regarding the status of new states as free soil or slave, it feared the loss of power. The Missouri Compromise defused the issue for a while, but during the 1840s and 1850s, the issue of slavery permeated national politics and was the cause of many bitter debates.

The admission of California to the Union as a free state in 1850 tipped the scales in favor of the free states and caused an outcry from the South. To mollify the slave states, the Fugitive Slave Act was passed which proved to be mostly symbolic since it was extremely difficult to enforce due to the noncompliance of northerners. As tensions rose, the abolitionist movement that flowered during the 1830s polarized the nation even further with its fervent crusade for emancipation. Southerners regarded abolitionist drive as a direct threat to their way of life and took draconian measures to suppress their message in the South(Altman ,55). Abolitionism was, in part, an outgrowth of religious revivalism with ministers preaching about the sinfulness of owning and mistreating other human beings. At the forefront of the movement was William Lloyd Garrison who, in addition to railing against the evils of slavery in speeches, also published a well-known abolitionist newspaper.

Abolitionists sometimes disagreed over the best way to achieve emancipation. Members of the American Colonization Society and others subscribed to the belief that emancipation should be gradual and that freed slaves should be shipped to Africa and other foreign lands(Anderson, 100). Most black abolitionists disagreed strongly with this idea and argued that freed slaves were Americans and ought to remain on their native soil. Though many northerners did not support the abolitionists, the movement increased enmity between the North and South. Three other events of the 1850s -- The Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred ...