Civil War

Civil War Background

In the mid-19th century, the United States was experiencing an era of tremendous growth. in the North, manufacturing and industry was well established, while the South's economy was based on a system of large-scale farming that depended on the labor of black slaves to grow certain crops, especially cotton and tobacco.

the Northern states wanted to prohibit slavery in the western territories. The Southern states opposed all efforts to block the expansion of slavery and feared that the North’s stance would eventually endanger existing slaveholdings in the South itself. By the 1850s, some Northerners including the Republican Party, had begun calling for the complete abolition of slavery, while several Southern states threatened to secede from the Union as a means to protect their right to keep slaves. When Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the antislavery Republican Party, was elected president in late 1860, the Southern states carried out their threat and seceded, organizing themselves as the Confederate States of America.

Secondly, During the mid eighteen hundreds, the United States government took up an aggressive plan to industrialize the nation, and created numerous government sponsored programsThese programs frequently infringed upon the rights of the State in which the conducted. Thus this new industrialization was quickly rejected

The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states. The incoming Lincoln administration and most of the Northern people refused to recognize the legitimacy of secession. They feared that it would discredit democracy and create a fatal precedent that would eventually fragment the no-longer United States into several small, squabbling countries."

Outbreak of the Civil War (1861)

Hostilities began in 1861, when Confederate forces fired upon Fort Sumter, a...