Slavery: Cause Of The American Civil War

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John Gunn HST 367 September 35, 2012 The North and South: Too Far Apart to Avoid War Although the Civil War was not originally fought to save or destroy the institution of slavery, the deep seeded tension between the slave and free states created over this topic of slavery made such a war inevitable. There were many factors that contributed to tensions which started the American Civil War however the most important of those factors was the institution of slavery. The American Civil War was inevitable due to the schisms ingrained within the nation that were created through fundamental differences in ideas and policies mostly concerning slavery and its expansion, People in the North and the South felt very differently about the topic…show more content…
It was assumed that Kansas would become a slave state because of its high potential for agriculture and its geographic location next to the slave state of Missouri. Anti-slavery efforts sought to recruit people to settle there in order to gain a majority and secure Kansas as a free state. These tensions escalated to violence between the two groups which came to be called “Bleeding Kansas”. Kansas helped reveal the issue of the expansion of slavery to people across the country and became a polarizing topic. Many American citizens in the North and the South were unhappy with the way that the government had handled the issue of Kansas. This is an example of how people fought over slavery before the Civil War began. The possibility of the expansion of slavery in the US was not limited to the continent. In the same year as the conflict in Kansas a document was written by American officials which sought to gain the colony of Cuba from the Spanish through either diplomatic or forceful negotiations. The Ostend Manifesto was supported by many in the South because they knew that if Cuba were to join the union it would become a slave state and many in the North feared that there was a risk of war with Spain did not wish to see the slave states gain any power in…show more content…
There are cases where individuals were able to become directly involved and greatly influence national and regional sentiments surrounding the institution of slavery. One such example was Harriet Beecher Stowe who was able to drastically changed the way that the average Northern citizen viewed slavery in the South by publishing Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1851. With her novel Stowe provided her northern readers with a glimpse of the toll that slavery took not only on the slaves themselves but on the white families that owned them as

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