Civil War History

The Civil War is considered a central and extremely significant event in America’s history. It was also the event the characterized what the United States ultimately stood for, and what it did not. It made America a nation, where before it had solely been an artificial series of states bound together by agreements and commitments. In a broad sense, the war was started by the king himself, cotton.

The production of cotton brought forth a series of drastic and in a sense, tragic, events forth too America. The production of cotton called for cheap laborers, and a lot of them; in other words, slavery. For the Union, this was a great tragedy, but this was especially devastating for the Southern states that took the matter of war simply as a gesture to instill enough fear for them to retire the use of a slave system. The Southerners completely underestimated the ability of a new president and crept recklessly into a battle that single-handedly destroyed everything that they stood for and more.

Beneficially for the south, Congress enjoyed inherent advantages that arose from the fact that sixty percent of the slave population could successfully be counted towards determining the number of congressional seats allocated to the section. Meanwhile, due to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Senate’s numbers were held for decades in balance. Due to those terms, the South was able to hold a long-term grip of dominance on the Democratic Party. Not only did this prohibit slavery in the former Louisiana Territory, but it also ensured that every new free-state admitted required the simultaneous admission of a new slave state. Consequently, the presidency was withheld by slaveholders for fifty of the sixty-two years up until 1850.

Demographically, between 1800 and 1860, the population had grown from about five million to thirty-two million, at a rate of growth six times the world average. While the South had a population of about eight million, with another four million black...