Talk:Origins of the American Civil War/Origins of the American Civil War
The origins of the American Civil War lay in the complex problems of
As territorial expansion forced the United States to confront the question of whether new areas of settlement were to be slave or free, as the power of the slaveholders in national politics waned, and as the North and the South developed starkly divergent economies and societies, the divisive issues of sectionalism catapulted the nation into a civil war after a president was elected who was very objectionable to slave-owing interests.
Cultural divergences and the rise of anti-slavery
Main article: Cultural divergences and the rise of anti-slavery before the American Civil War
Northern society went through a number of changes that allowed for the eventual development of a an anti-slavery movement in the
The perception of slavery by northern activists at the time were inspired at first by Yankee
The expansion of the
Sectional tensions and the question of slavery in the West
Main article: Tensions over slavery in the West before the American Civil War
The politicians of the 1850s were acting in a society in which the traditional restraints that suppressed sectional conflict in 1820 and 1850 - the most important of which being the stability of two-party system - were being eroded as this rapid extension of mass democracy went forward in the North. A plethora of new parties emerged and politics became a part of mass culture and entertainment, galvanizing unprecedented voter turnout. Controversy over the so-called Ostend Manifesto (which proposed U.S. annexation of Cuba) and the return of fugitive slaves kept sectional tensions alive in the early fifties, and then in the mid-to-late fifties some astute politicians mobilized support by focusing on the expansion of slavery in the West.
A series of compromises were proposed to quell the divisions, raising the question of whether the tensions of the era were a result of the accidental, unnecessary work of self-interested or fanatical agitators or whether they resulted from an inevitable, irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces. The irrepressible conflict argument gained prominence in the decades immediately following the Civil War, painting it as a stark moral conflict in which the South was to blame as a result of its designs of slave power. The idea of the war as avoidable did not gain ground among historians until the 1920s, when the "revisionists" began to offer new accounts of the prologue to the conflict. More recent studies have emphasized the role of political agitation, with the breakdown of the previous two-party system (in which each party represented a broad coalition of views) giving way to smaller, more intensely ideologous parties.
Slavery in the West
The tensions came to a head over the issue of slavery in the western territories. This issue had been present since the
Coming out of the issue of transportation was the
Although the basis of the conflict in Kansas was not directly related to slavery, the