Why did the american civil war start? State`s rights, slavery and economic development

28 January 2007

Why the American Civil War Started

Introduction

The American Civil War , even over a century after it ended , remains one of the most closely studied , and disputed events in American history While the results of the war are clearly apparent , many of the factors that sparked the beginning of the Civil War remain in debate to this day . Again , specific events are not in question , but the driving factors behind those events are sometimes murky at best . In the modern day , there are still many who simply classify

the American Civil War as a battle over the issue of slavery . While it is true that this issue was pivotal in the conflict , there were other significant differences between the Union and Confederacy that fueled the fire of the conflict In this , some of the other major factors that fueled the fire of a war that nearly destroyed a new nation and set the tone for an entire generation of Americans will be presented and briefly explained

The Issue of States ' Rights

One of the key issues , in fact probably one of the major issues that led to the American Civil War was the dispute over the rights of the individual states . Not being too far removed from the war against Britain that created the independent United States themselves , it is likely that the mindset of being able to chart one 's own political social , and economic future still existed in the individual states , all of whom were controlled to some extent by the central federal government (Paludan , 1998

First was the issue of taxation , which once again , was one of the factors that led to the fight to create an independent United States in the first place . Each of the individual states was required of course to collect taxes and forward that revenue to the coffers of the centralized federal government . With this payment of taxes came the right of each state to have a voice in the House of Representatives and Congress , but some states were disd that this representative voice may not have been heard clearly enough . For the American south , this was a particularly sore subject as a mainly agricultural part of the nation , the southerners felt a sense of entitlement in that they should be given economic subsidies and reduced taxes because of the cash crops that were largely impossible to grow in the north , such as tobacco cotton , and sugar cane (Morrison , 1997 . Having , in effect , cornered the market on these commodities , the south felt that they should not have been so heavily taxed , and that the prices gained for these crops in the north may have been intentionally kept artificially low , to their financial detriment , especially given the huge expenses such as labor which led to the widespread use of slave labor

Slave labor , contrary to popular belief , was not invented by the American south , nor did American southerners travel to Africa in any large manner to capture Africans to...