The Most Significant Cause of the Civil War

The American civil war, which was fought from 1861 to 1865, is considered the most gruesome event in the American History. The bloody war that pitted the Americans against each other had many causes. The causes for the civil war include the Declaration of Independence, morality, Westward movement, ethnicity, and slavery. Among all these causes of the US civil war, slavery is considered as the most significant. The paper that follows will describe how the issue of slavery contributed to the US civil war.

The Northern and the Southern parts of the US developed along different lines. There was rapid industrialization in the North while the South was dominantly an agrarian economy. The differences in economic, political, cultural, and social beliefs led to disagreements that precipitated into a fully blown civil war.

The debate over the future of slavery was so intense that it literally led to the disruption of the union. This dispute led to secession, which resulted into a war in which the Western and Northern states battled to retain and preserve the union. At the same time, the Southern States resisted the union forces and partook in the fight for secession (Vorenberg, 2001).

The Southerners were reluctant to follow the example set by the Northerners of abolishing slavery. Because slavery was deeply engraved into the Southern economy, the South deemed it necessary to fight in the civil war, at the very least for self-preservation (Vorenberg, 2001). Additionally, the Southerners fiercely fought in the civil war out of fear that the abolitionist movement that hit the North would spread to their region. In essence, the Southerners viewed slavery as the bedrock of their economy; it was the source of labour for their expansive farms and slaves were considered valuable assets as far as the determination of their master’s net worth was concerned (Vorenberg, 2001)

Reference

Vorenberg, M. (2001). Final freedom: The Civil War, the abolition of slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment. Cambridge [u.a.: Cambridge Univ. Press.