Term Paper on "Causes of the American Civil War"

Term Paper 6 pages (1970 words) Sources: 4 Style: APA

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Civil War

The Causes of the American Civil War

The American Civil War was the bloodiest conflict to that point in the nation's history. Dividing the United States into two countries at arms against one another, the internal rift which in many ways continues to levy an impact on America's identity today was forged on a wide range of grievances. It is tempting to regard the events which immediately preceded the war as markers of an increasingly worsened divergence between two cultures. A closer inspection of the two centuries in developmental history which led America to the doorstop of Southern secession, however, suggest that this is an inverted portrayal of the pattern. To the contrary, the circumstances separating North and South in identity had been pertinent to the Union's development since the earliest days of its colonization during the 17th century. Heightened tension and a dense history of legislative actions on the cusp of this war proceeded from a collective American pursuit of a goal which was becoming exponentially more difficult to retain with each passing generation. The aim of holding together a Union composed of two clearly demarcated cultural, social and economic outlooks would be greatly confounded as the nation expanded to include new regions to both the northwest and southwest. Here, during the mid-19th century, a careful and sometimes borderline impossible balance which had for some two hundred years kept in peaceable check the instinctually uncommon interests of North and South finally brought both sides to an inevitable impasse. The result, a conflict which endured from 1861 to 1865 and claimed the lives of more than 500,000 Americans, is one which had been in the making since the pre-Revolutionary era of colonialism and which had become fully unavoidable with America's inevitable growth.

Differences between America's North and South during the earliest periods of colonialism were the product of both regional factors and ethnic ones. New England was the seedling of the northeast, with the pilgrim settlers of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island providing an early blueprint for the cultural identity of their region. Puritan leaders had envisioned the new colonies as a potential bastion for religious freedom, given that their endeavor there had been itself an effort to escape the persecution of the Church of England. The Plymouth Rock colony from which the original influx of northern immigrants took its cue, established in 1633 an ethically-based settlement in the North. (Woodword, 22)

Certainly this sharply contrasts the motives which provided a basis for the 1607 landing at a Jamestown in what would soon become the colony of Virginia. Founded by the Virginia Company, a group of entrepreneurs awarded a charter by King James to prospect the Chesapeake Bay area for economic opportunities favoring England, Jamestown is both theoretically and literally a point of origin for a key distinction between North and South. In a sense representative of the eventual Southern perspective which excused slavery for so long, Jamestown was founded with the intent of making money. This motive, in addition to juxtaposing the pointedly moralistic principal of Northern settlement, driven as it was by lofty religious ambition, would also endow the South with a degree of ethical flexibility as it pertained to the achievement of its interests.

That condition would make Jamestown a sensible venue for a "crucial event that would play a role in the development of America [with] the arrival of Africans to Jamestown. A Dutch slave trader exchanged his cargo of Africans for food in 1619. The Africans became indentured servants, similar in legal position to many poor Englishmen who traded several year's labor in exchange for passage to America." (APVA, 1) in addition to providing a model for the future labor approach of the American south, this transaction suggested to profit-driven developers that the New World's greatest resources would be agricultural and that the ideal means for their exploitation could be free African labor.

It is important to note that as the 17th century progressed, the slavery of Africans was disseminated throughout the colonized continent. Penetration occurred in both the North and South as the latter part of the colonial era segued into the slave trade boom of the 18th century. During this time, England and other colonizing forces from throughout the European continent developed commercial relations with African slave-traders, placing in bondage more than 20 million Africans to be sold into servitude. While many of these were sent to labor in Brazil, the Caribbean Islands and parts of Latin America, the South of America would attract an increasingly dominant level of slave trade business as it began to realize its own agricultural potential.

In the North, British expatriates had begun to employ strategies of colony development that reflected urbanization trends in England. Attributable to the cultural ideas of community, industry and settlement from which they had departed, New Englanders gradually developed the template for the American city. Boston, Hartford, Philadelphia and others would begin to provide a basis for economic growth in the commercial melting pot of the modern metropolis. This natural predisposition, like that which gave Virginia's earliest settlers over to the slave-trade, was not just as a result of cultural but also of regional peculiarity.

As opposed to the lush and fertile coastal stretches and wide, arable land expanses in the South, "many areas of the North were not suited by soil or climate for the sort of large-scale, staple-crop agriculture that had become dependent on slavery. Modern scholars believe slavery could have been made to function in industrial or other settings, but pre-Civil War Americans generally believed that it was suitable only for the cultivation of vast amounts of certain basic crops such as rice, tobacco, sugar, and, later, cotton." (Woodworth, 25)

As a result of these differences, the South developed an economy which had become, by the approach of the American War for Independence, an agricultural powerhouse. The plantation system, in which wealthy white landowners employed slave labor to sustain massive planting, growing, harvesting and trading operations, made the American South a world capital for tobacco, hemp, cotton and all manner of farmable resource. Free labor naturally inflated dramatically the profit margins possible here as opposed to in the North, where the relative modesty of slavery's presence had given the colonies north of Maryland's Mason-Dixon line a wage-based industrial economy. This promoted, even in the pursuit of agricultural trade, an implementation of modes based on efficiency rather than slavery. This encouraged machining industries, the vitality of the skilled artisan and economies based on job qualification and compensation. Rather than to idealize the North, this is to suggest that its economy was driven by a completely different process than that which powered its southern neighbor. Here, even before its Declaration of Independence, the prenatal United States appears to betray critical distinctions between North and South. If it can be said that these are two different nations, such is a condition which came into being far in advance of their mutual push for independence.

When the U.S. emerged from its war against England, the seeds for the Civil War were already sown. As American patriots used a philosophical argument against British imposition which compared such to slavery, it became increasingly difficult for many leaders of the Revolution to endorse or excuse the bondage of Africans. At the time of its independence, the United States came to be as two distinct regions. In the North, slavery was widely regarded as immoral and in the years immediately following Constitutional ratification, most states illegalized forced labor. For the first few decades of its existence, the southern set of states in the U.S. continued to thrive on slavery and the trade triangle between Europe, Africa and the South. When in 1808, the U.S. made the importation of slavery illegal, smuggling operations continued to move free labor onto the plantations of the southern Atlantic region.

Rifts between North and South would become apparent almost immediately upon the establishment of a new Union. It appears a worthy assessment that economic interests are at the foundation of the widening distinction between sides. However, a whole host of ideological differences would arise from this single point of conflict that would draw more sharply the lines separating the two sides. Specifically, the Southern equivocation between the debate over slavery and many other philosophical building blocks to the new democracy tended to suggest that the differences which enabled slavery in the South and rendered it anathema in the North were tantamount to the divergences in ideas over proper governance. Nothing less than the basis of Constitution was held to be at issue between them, with the South taking exception to the potential of the central government to overstep its authority at the expense of personal liberty.

Close inspection of this position suggests more than an ideological distinction between sides, though, an act of subterfuge on the part of southern slaveholders. With the northern rejection of slavery came inbuilt a threat to the fabric of Southern survival. Already, the 19th century was… READ MORE

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