Causes of Civil War

Introduction

The American Civil War was fought with such ferocity that it cost more lives than all of America's other wars combined. The ferocity of the arguments about its causes reflects the complexity of the forces at work in American prewar society, which brought on the war after a decade of political crises. The History of the causes and events of Civil war can be segregated in to two schools of thoughts. Some believes that the war was the consequence of the differing interest between Southern and Northern states. Others accuse the politicians who failed to avert the factors that ignited a needless war. The point of views of researchers and political analysts, also segregated on whether the principal reason of the war were the issues of doctrine of state's rights and sectional interest, or the symptom of more critical differences such as slavery. Nevertheless, there were issues developing; creating tension between North and South, since the creation of the American republic (Hsieh & Wayne Wei-siang, p. 24). In this paper, we will discuss events and major causes of the Civil War.

Discussion & Analysis

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 others ...