Factors that Causes American Civil War

By 1860, Nevins said that "in nearly all aspects of material civilization, the North had far bystripped [the southwestward]" (Ordeal of the center 208). The growing disparity mingled with the rapid industrialization of the North, its acclivitous population and expansion in the West and the less propellant agrarian economy of the South gradually undermined the political balance of the early years of the Republic. That growth and expansion led to a serial publication of protective tariffs after 1816 which were designed to protect the child industries in the North and to preserve their markets in the South from slope competition, large public expenditures for internal improvements which primarily benefited the North and former(a) measures which the South resisted. Thus developed what Owsley called "the eternal struggle between the agrarian South and the commercial and industrial North to support the government either in its own interest or, negatively, to stay fresh the other section from controlling it" (125).

The first major conflict, the nullification Crisis of 1832, came about over an attempt of the South Carolina legislature to subvert a tariff enacted by Congress. It was resolved through a combination of President Andrew Jackson's firmness and a compromise worked out between the sections. A much more serious series of crises developed in the late 1840s

Oates, Stephen B. With Malice Toward None The Life of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.

The cultured War was not fought to free the slaves. Many of the founders of the Republic, including James Madison, doubting Thomas Jefferson and John Randolph, and at least three Presidents, Jefferson, Jackson and Zachary Taylor (1848-1850), were slaveholders. emancipationist sentiment in the North grew after 1840, plainly, according to Nevins, the abolitionists were endlessly "a relatively small and uninfluential group" (Ordeal of the junction 201). Brock said that "the vast majority of whites, North and South, believed that the blacks were intellectually, morally and biologically inferior" (86).

That view prevailed among almost all major political leaders, including Lincoln who said in the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 that "Negroes were not his equal or Douglas' in moral or intellectual accomplishments" (Oates 154). Lincoln, however, held that they were human beings who were entitle to the basic rights guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence, life, liberty and the pursuit of triumph (Oates 154, 156). Lincoln was eventually impelled to emancipate the slaves in 1864 in response to the military and ideological imperatives of the war, but his biographer Oates says that Lincoln always believed that "separation of the races was the only long-term solution" and favored the settlement of blacks elsewhere (161). Even on the eve of the war, he told the South "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to step in with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists" (Foote 39). Nevertheless, Lincoln believed, as he told a group of black leaders in 1862, that "but for your race, there could not be war" (Oates 239). While some historians have agreed with historian James Ford Rhodes that "it whitethorn be safely asserted that there was a maven cause [of the war], slavery," most of them agree that slavery, or what Nevins called the problem of " indissoluble race adjustment," was the c
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