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Was Slavery The Main Cause Of The Civil War Essay

argumentative Essay
740 words
740 words
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To what extent was slavery the main cause of the civil war?
In this essay I am going to discuss the causes of the civil war and if slavery was one of the main reasons it happened. I think the civil war started because of lots of different reasons, slavery and the westward expansion being some of them, but I am going to talk about how I think slavery is definitely one of the main causes.1 In 1808 there were more than one million slaves in the United States. The number of slaves continued to increase. In some Southern states for example, South Carolina, slaves outnumbered the amount of the white population. Slavery started to come about around 1776. Slavery had been practised in British North America from early colonial days. Slavery was recognised in the thirteen colonies at the time of the Declaration of Independence.
There were lots of possible causes for the civil war, the westward expansions being one of them. 1 Some of the problems with the westward expansion were that the settlers found life hard. The Government promised all those who could pay a $10 registration fee, 160 acres of land would be theirs in the West. The aim of the Homestead Act in 1862 was to encourage people to take up farming and help sustain the settler communities. The problem was that many settlers didn’t know how to farm and they found that the conditions and climate was too harsh to work in. It was also hard to farm with the lack of vegetation and the hot weather. There were also problems with where the boundaries should be drawn for the expansion. They also didn’t know how large the population of a territory should be before Statehood could be granted. These were the questions that the Government had to ask themselves about the expansion. Therefore thi...

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...1There were more slaves in the Southern states of America, as the conditions were better for the slaves to work on a plantation to make cotton. Conflicts started between the “Slave” and “Free” states and increased more as religious groups such as the Quakers began to argue that slavery was a moral evil. As a result of this conflict slavery was abolished in the Northern states between 1774 and 1804. In the South slavery was an essential as they needed large amounts of unskilled labour for their cotton plantations.
In conclusion I think that there were a lot of different reasons why the civil war came about but I think that the main reason for this was slavery and the poor ways that slaves were being treated. Slaves were treated like animals, they were dehumanised. I think that the conflict arose from different situations but slavery made the civil war come about.

In this essay, the author

  • Opines that slavery was the main cause of the civil war.
  • Explains that the westward expansions caused a lot of conflict which could have triggered the civil war.
  • Analyzes how slavery increased dramatically after the invention of eli whitneys' cotton gin in 1793 and how the slaves were being treated was another massive problem for slavery.
  • Explains that a slave entered the world in an old, one room, and dirty shack. work for slaves began at sunrise and ended at long as there was light.
  • Explains that slavery was abolished in the northern states between 1774 and 1804. in the south, the conditions were better for slaves to work on cotton plantations.
  • Concludes that slavery and the poor ways that slaves were being treated made the civil war come about.

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