Introduction
Most people believe the Civil War was fought only over slavery and for abolition. Because of the speech Abraham Lincoln gave “The emancipation Proclamation,” it looks like the Civil War was a war about the morals of the nation. A war could not be stopped from happening once the Compromise of 1850 happened. The South was frantic to keep slavery going. Their whole economy was bases around the economics of slavery. The North did not realize that there was more than freeing the slaves to do with the war. The economics of the south was free labor caused by slavery. The black slave was a God sent for the Southern states in that it allowed them to make a great profit off their crops. William Freehling said, “Posterity thinks of slavery as the South’s leading economic interest” (239). The Northern states were against slavery but they did not realize what it would do to the South when slavery is abolished. “The Southern economy, however, was built on the labor of the African-American slave, who were oppressed into providing cheap labor.” (History Central, web) This paper will allow us to look at the complete economics side of slavery and what effect it would have on them.
History of Slaveries start in the South
The Dutch West India Company was commissioned “to supply the colonist with as many Blacks as they conveniently can.” (Morison 75) When the South started to be developed in 1625 when The Virginian Company said, “Any Englishmen who agrees to take out at least 250 people at his own expense was allowed to choose … 1250 acres or more” (Morison 54) This is how the Plymouth Colony was started. These men were not blue-collar workers, for they had money and position. They did not want to work with their...
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...nd the North blockaded the Southern ports the south was doomed. They needed money to live and pay for the war and without being able to export their only cash crop they could not keep going. Their whole economy was about slavery and the great economics it creates for the owners, and for the Southern States.
Works Cited
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Freehling, William W. The Road to Disunion, Volumn II. Vol. II. New York: Oxford university Press, 2007, print.
History Central. "Economics of the Civil war." 2008. History Central. Web 23 April 2011.
Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Oxford History of the American People. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965, print.
Readers Digest. The Story of America. New York: Readers Digest Assoc., 1975, Print.
The predominantly agrarian South had few forms of liquid wealth; slaves and land comprised the majority of southern capital. The cultivation of cotton and the profits made by its sales was paramount to the economy and so with the loss of northern buyers, the Confederate’s economic status was destined for failure.
According to Michael F. Holt, economics did not play much of a role leading up to the American Civil War. Although, one can argue that political and economic issues go hand in hand. Mr. Holt does not see economic differences as the main cause for the American Civil War. He points to the fact that these economic an industry differences had been around for many years prior to the war with little friction.
Growing dissent between the North and South began mounting years before the Civil War. This disagreement between the two regions led to each side understanding the major differences between one another. The regions had different political views, moral views, and views on the future for the economy. One key difference between the North and South was their view on slavery. The South’s economy was based primarily on cash crops like cotton. These crops were grown on plantations with slaves as the chief labor source. The South wanted to continue and expand the practice of slavery into the West, but the North was adamantly against such action. Many antislavery and abolition movements had significant support in the North. This disagreement eventually led to the beginning of the Civil War. Each side had different advantages and disadvantages at the onset of war due to the differences in the economies and people in the North and South prior to the Civil War. The key advantages and disadvantages of the North and South contributed to the success or complication of each side’s war strategies. The advantages of the North outweighed their disadvantages and the South’s advantages leading to a victory for the North in the American Civil War.
Slavery was merely one of the causes of the Civil War. Some historians argue that the political difference between the North and the South is a more influential cause of the Civil War while some insist that economic is the main cause. In fact, the political division between the North and the South was affected by the differences in the economic system of both. The North and the South had had different economic backgrounds that were established since the American colonial period. These economic differences from the colonial period brought about the political division that was based on preserving each other’s own wealth or property and eventually caused the Civil War.
The response of the North was the blockade on the southern states. This dealt a similar blow to the South that privateering would cause to the North: the loss of supplies. Since the south was a primarily agricultural area, they had few factories to produce war supplies. The goal of the blockade was to cut any supplies and allow the underdeveloped southern states to run out of war goods. Fortunately for the Confederacy, their large coastline was very difficult for the Union Navy to completely blockade.
Everybody has something they feel that makes their lives easier, something a person becomes so accustomed to they could not live without it. This is what African slaves were to the Southern colonists. Slavery was a huge factor in the Southerner’s lives. Originally the colonists used indentured servants to work in their homes and on their plantations. This situation was not ideal because the Southern farmers wanted more control over their workers (orange). Virginian farmers heard about the success of slavery in the Caribbean and thought it would be a good solution to their problems (blue). The southern colonists had a very different way of earning a living than in the north. They needed people to work through “the harsh realities of a land-rich, but labor-scarce economy…” (Purple). The plantation owners had all the land and resources, but no one to work on their grounds long term. Throughout the years 1607-1775, slavery rose as an important contributor to the South’s economy due to social, geographic and economic aspects.
The Civil War was an important war over the freedom of slaves in the U.S.. The Civil War is well known for being caused by the issue of slavery, but it is really a combination of different events and actions that caused tensions to rise throughout the country. The economic and political issues in the U.S., along with certain actions caused the Civil war, which is one of the United States’s worst wars. All in all, the Civil War was one of the most devastating wars for our country as a whole, and the process of rebuilding would take years and is no easy job.
Throughout the years, many people have been taught that the reason the Civil War happened, was to abolish slavery all through the United States. Although that is true, there were more reasons why the Civil War occurred.Referencing will be done on different articles and writers to support the findings of the authors. The article “Slavery, the Constitutional, and the Origins of the Civil War” by Paul Finkelman, discusses about the North (union) and the South (confederacy) and the disagreement of the territories following the constitutional laws regarding slavery, the article explores both sides of the territories and their beliefs of how the situation of slavery should have been dealt with. The article “The Economic Origins of the Civil War” by Marc Egnal, discusses the North’s (union) and the South’s (confederacy) economic situation that could have pushed the two territories to engage in war with one another. Finally, the last article “Politics, Ideology, and the Origins of the American Civil War” by Eric Foner, focuses on the Norths (union) and Souths (confederacy) views on politics and ideas of how each territory is ran and how they have affected the North and the South. These historians supplied specific and different explanations that explained what exactly caused the United States to enter into a Civil War. With the information provided by the authors, the evidence will lead us to the answer of what caused the Civil War.
The majority of speculations regarding the causes of the American Civil War are in some relation to slavery. While slavery was a factor in the disagreements that led to the Civil War, it was not the solitary or primary cause. There were three other, larger causes that contributed more directly to the beginning of the secession of the southern states and, eventually, the start of the war. Those three causes included economic and social divergence amongst the North and South, state versus national rights, and the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott case. Each of these causes involved slavery in some way, but were not exclusively based upon slavery.
Why were the southern states so dependent upon slaves that they were willing to fight a war over their right to keep them? The answer lies in the social and economic differences between the north and the south. The southern United State’s climate was perfect for agriculture. Plants like tobacco, cotton, indigo and sugar had become extremely profitable to produce.(2-615) To increase profits, the farms, known as plantations, had to grow. Managing a plantation of an average of 335 acres took a lot of labor, and the most economical source was the slave trade. Without slaves, plantation owners would have to hire people to manage their farms, an option that many were either unable to take or unwilling to consider.
First of all, there is an economic difference between the North and the South. In the North, society was fast becoming industrial and focused more on city life. In contrast, the South remained a region of small towns and large plantations. As Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793, cotton became very profitable (Grischy). People who owned land began to grow cotton which led to a large amount of cheap labor, so slaves were needed. The South became a one crop economy which depended mostly on cotton and therefore on slavery. On the other hand, the North was based more on industry rather than agriculture. It focused on manufacturing and using raw materials to make finished goods. While the northern people favored taxes on imports, also known as tariffs that protected factory owners and workers from foreign competition, the southern people, on the other hand, were opposed to tariffs. In order for Southerners to buy goods from the North, the Northern politicians passed heavy taxes on imported goods from Europe. The economic difference was one of the reasons that div...
The South opposed industrialization, so therefore they manufactured very little. Much of the manufactured supplies had to be traded in. Southerners therefore opposed high tariffs. The manufacturing financial system of the North, insisted high tariffs to defend its goods from inexpensive overseas competition.
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