what were some of the causes of the civil war????

Question

i have a project due on thursday and im having trouble finding out the political, economical and social causes of the civil war
Please help

Answer 1

There can be but answer the truth! If Lincoln offered to allow us to return to the Union with and keep our slaves what does that tell you? “and they [Yankees] are marked ... with such a perversity of character, as to constitute, from that circumstance, the natural division of our parties” Thomas Jefferson

In the 1770s, the South had every reason to continue the relationship with England, one of its best customers. It was the manufacturing North that was getting the short end of that stick. Southerners joined the Revolutionary War out of patriotism, idealism, and enlightened political philosophy such as motivated Jefferson, not patriotism, philosophy, and economic betterment which inspired the North.
In 1860, the shoe was on the other foot. Southern agrarians were at heel to the nation's bankers and industrialists. That just got worse with the election of the Republican Lincoln, bringing back into power the party favoring the wealthy supply side, as it still does.
Then as now central to that, party's interest was keeping down the cost of manufacture. Today labor is the big cost, so today they move the plants offshore and leave US workers to their fate. Back before the US labor movement existed the big cost was raw materials, and the GOP was just as unprincipled toward its Southern suppliers as it is today toward labor.
Thanks to modern graveyard science and surviving records, researchers know that in 1760, 100 years before the War Between the States, Charleston, South Carolina, had the largest population of slaves and we say proudly the second largest slave population was in New York City.
One of the main quarrels was about taxes paid on goods brought into this country from foreign countries. This tax was called a tariff. Southerners felt these tariffs were unfair and aimed toward them because they imported a wider variety of goods than most Northern people. Taxes were also placed on many Southern goods that were shipped to foreign countries, an expense that was not always applied to Northern goods of equal value. An awkward economic structure allowed states and private transportation companies to do this, which also affected Southern banks that found themselves paying higher interest rates on loans made with banks in the North. As industry in the North expanded, it looked towards southern markets, rich with cash from the lucrative agricultural business, to buy the North's manufactured goods. The situation grew worse after several "panics", including one in 1857 that affected more Northern banks than Southern. Southern financiers found themselves burdened with high payments just to save Northern banks that had suffered financial losses through poor investment. However, it was often cheaper for the South to purchase the goods abroad. In order to "protect" the northern industries Jackson slapped a tariff on many of the imported goods that could be manufactured in the North. When South Carolina passed the Ordinance of Nullification in November 1832, refusing to collect the tariff and threatening to withdraw from the Union, Jackson ordered federal troops to Charleston. A secession crisis was averted when Congress revised the Tariff of Abominations in February 1833. The Panic of 1837 and the ensuing depression began to gnaw like a hungry animal on the flesh of the American system. The disparity between northern and southern economies was exacerbated. Before and after the depression the economy of the South prospered. Southern cotton sold abroad totaled 57% of all American exports before the war. The Panic of 1857 devastated the North and left the South virtually untouched. The clash of a wealthy, agricultural South and a poorer, industrial North was intensified by abolitionists who were not above using class struggle to further their cause.
In the years before the Civil War the political power in the Federal government, centered in Washington, D.C., was changing. Northern and mid-western states were becoming more and more powerful as the populations increased. Southern states lost political power because the population did not increase as rapidly. As one portion of the nation grew larger than another, people began to talk of the nation as sections. This was called sectionalism. Just as the original thirteen colonies fought for their independence almost 100 years earlier, the Southern states felt a growing need for freedom from the central Federal authority in Washington. Southerners believed that state laws carried more weight than Federal laws, and they should abide by the state regulations first. This issue was called State's Rights and became a very warm topic in congress.

These are facts not emotions or unsupported claims, now what was the War over?


God Bless You and The Southern People.

Answer 2

The last guy is totally wrong! The civil war WAS about slavery b/c there was a lack of other issues in the day to cause the war!!!! The excuse is that it was about states rights and Southern slavery at the hands of the North, which only a lazy bonehead would actually believe!!! The Southern Democrats, who were pro-slavery (same exact party as today but they dont teach that in hs history!), known as Jacksonian Democrats, set themselves up early in the countrys history to have a monopoly on the executive branch of govt (the Presidency) and the military corps. Thats why they had most of the officers during the civil war and the North was lacking leadership. During Jeffersons presidency he set up the military academy at West Point, NY and made sure the officers would defend Democratic-Republican principles (ie Corruption, my words). Lets not forget that Lincolns opinion on slavery was the average opinion: African Americans aren't really equal to whites, but they should have their own rights nonetheless. The Greeks and Romans had slaves, but it wasnt about race, it was more of a war-prisoners-turned-slaves thingy. What had to go was this European idea that whites were superior to blacks, so we could do whatever we wanted with them including murder and cruelty. Thats the civil war in a nutshell!

Answer 3

Slavery was part of it. But there was also the issue that the southern states were not being allowed to trade directly with Europe. Many southerners will tell you this was the main reason, and point to the fact that until abolition, there were plenty of slaves in the north, which is true enough.

Also compelling in this regard is the undeniable fact that industrial agriculture was clearly about to make slave owning not cost effective, and the slaves were about to be liberated anyway, for simple economic reasons.

Answer 4

The Civil War was caused by a myriad of conflicting pressures, principles, and prejudices, fueled by sectional differences and pride, and set into motion by a most unlikely set of political events. Slavery was a big part of it, too.

Answer 5

Slavery was one reason, but it was not the whole reason. Part of it was the South didnt like it when slaves escaped to the North, and they became free in the North. Cant really remember much, never really did pay too much attention in 7th grade Social Studies.

Answer 6

Slavery, states rights, the right to secede from the Union, and who was going to control the rich lands of the West, the industrial North or the Agrarian South?

Chow!!

Answer 7

Don't go for the obvious: Slavery

Instead focus on the South being more about States rights vs. the North which was more focused on Federalism.

The Southern States really hated centralized government and having an over powerful Federal system controlling their lives.

Answer 8

Basically Cromwell was opposed to..... Oh I'm sorry "the" civil war, the only one which ever took place on Earth. Maybe it was ignorance on the part of Americans, comme d'habitude.

Answer 9

What became the American war of the 1860s was rooted deep in the evolution of English Common Law into what became the Constitution of the United States. In this evolution individual rights became increasingly significant. In the American version of this perspective of life, individual States were considered Sovereign as noted in Article One of the 1783 Treaty of Peace. While these independent States came together in the Articles of Confederation, to be considered perpetual, that sovereignty was never surrendered. Further, the transition form those Articles of Confederation established the State power to retain the power of secession in that to join the Union of States by ratification of the new Constitution, secession had to be initiated from the Articles. The States never surrendered this power.

The South, fought solely for the intent of the Founders’ for the inalienable right of a people to change their government ... to withdraw from a Union into which they had, as sovereign communities, voluntarily entered. The existence of African servitude, was not the cause of the conflict, but only one of a number of elements. The War had its origin in the organic Structure of the Government of the States. It was a strife between the principles of Centralism and Consolidation of Federation and the Sovereign entity of the States.

The real cause of the war that killed more than 620,000 people was a difference of opinion about the Constitution that had existed since ratification. The Civil War was not a war to preserve the American nation and to abolish slavery, but rather a war of federal intervention into Sovereign Southern States’ Constitutional rights.

There were those who posited a clash between interest groups and classes as the central theme of American history--industry vs. agriculture, capital vs. labor, railroads vs. farmers, manufacturers vs. consumers, and so on. However, the real issues of American politics revolved around the economic interests of these contesting groups: tariffs, taxes, banks and finance, land policies, industrial and labor policies, subsidies to business or agriculture, and the like.

American political history progressed in an undeviating line from the clash between Jeffersonian Republicans and Hamiltonian Federalists in the 1790s to the similar clashes between the New Deal/ Fair Deal Democrats and conservative Republicans in the 1930s and 1940s. In part this can be founded in the Marshall court opinion of McCulloch v. Maryland where Marshall interpreted the 18th Clause of Section 8 of Article I of the Constitution to a new meaning by stating that the words “Necessary” and “Proper” have the same meaning. This was not true in history, law or language usage but establish a foundation in which Congress could do as it wished outside of its delegated powers.

The war transferred to the battlefield a long-running contest between plantation agriculture and industrializing capitalism in which the industrialists emerged triumphant. This was not primarily a conflict between North and South: Merely by the accidents of climate, soil, and geography, was it a sectional struggle--the accidental fact that plantation agriculture was located in the South and industry mainly in the North. Nor was it a contest between slavery and freedom. Slavery just happened to be the labor system of plantation agriculture, as wage labor was the system of Northern industry. For some Progressive historians, neither system was significantly worse or better than the other-"wage slavery" was as exploitative as chattel bondage. In any case, slavery was not a moral issue for anybody except a tiny number of abolitionists; its abolition was a mere incident of the destruction of the plantation order by the war. The real issues between the North and South in antebellum politics were the tariff, government subsidies to transportation and manufacturing, public land sales, financial policies, and other types of economic questions on which manufacturing and planting interests had clashing viewpoints.

As a note: The South did not trample over the rights of the North by enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act. This was an enforcing of Constitutional restrictions on the States to recognize the laws of other States and not allow fugatives to escape to other States. This cannot not be considered a "nullification" of federal law as described in the Virginia Resolution, rather it is an enforcment of Constitutional law that can only be changed by Constitutional Amendment.

Answer 10

Slavery,jealousy,greed