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How Did The South Cause The Civil War Dbq

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The Civil War, an event resulted from a nation being torn apart by its own differences. “A house divided by itself cannot stand.”, as claimed by Abraham Lincoln. A gruesome war between the Northern part of the U.S. (the Union) and the Southern part of the U.S. (the Confederacy), the Civil War took place mainly in the South and lasted from 1861 to 1865. The political differences, economic differences, and idealistic slavery differences between the North and the South are what caused the Civil War. The first main cause of the Civil War was conflict between the North and the South about their slavery ideals. The North and the South had exceedingly different ideals about slavery. The South was a very hardworking section of the country, and they …show more content…

The economy in the South was based on plantations, mostly bales of cotton that were managed by slaves (Doc. B). Their economy was so great that, in 1857, out of the $279,000,000 the U.S. produced of domestic products, the South produced $158,000,000 out of articles like cotton and rice, which could not be made in the North; perhaps this is what lead them to believe they were so powerful. (Doc. D). However, they also felt they depended too much on the North for articles of utility and adornment, as well as rail-roads, canals, and other public improvements (Doc. C). The North, on the contrary, worked primarily on industries and factories. (Doc. B). The conflict between the two came when the South wanted to leave the Constitution and become its own country (Doc. E), which meant that the U.S. would lose a huge amount of its economy, although this was not the main reason why the North did not like the idea of the South leaving the U.S. The North and the South had distinguishably different economies, with the South’s being rural and the North’s industrial, so any changes in tariffs mostly benefited the North rather than the South, which is what mostly upset the …show more content…

The South had distinctly separate political views. So much so that South Carolina felt the need to secede from the Constitution, which resulted “from the nature of a compact between sovereign parties” (Doc. E). However, the North had different views on such a decision; they did not want South Carolina to leave the Constitution, and they asserted that “in contemplation of universal law and the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual” (Doc. F). Other political conflicts, such as the bitter contest between pro-slavery and anti-slavery due to the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed in 1854 -which organized the Kansas-Nebraska territories on the principle of popular sovereignty- (Doc. J); the speech given by Senator Charles Sumner over the Kansas-Nebraska bill in which he attacked pro-slavery men and insulted South Carolina and one of its senators, the well-liked Andrew Butler -to which Preston Brooks responded to by busting into the Senate chambers and beating Sumner with a cane- (Doc. K); the Dredd Scott Decision, in which Dredd Scott, a slave whose owner had taken him from a slave state to the free North, returned to Missouri and sued for his freedom, which set off even more controversy over slavery (Doc. L); and Abraham Lincoln’s speech when accepting the Republican nomination for US Senator in June 16, 1858, in which he stated that the pro-slavery/anti-slavery conflict

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