Issue Of Slavery example essay topic

Slavery was the cause of the American Civil War because it was the source of conflict. The problem was not so much that slavery was widespread or that an abundance of Americans, or Southerners, owned slaves. The issue here is how many Americans enjoyed the benefits of slavery. The produce of slave labor had to be sold and shipped to foreign lands. Slave Plantations specialized in mainly cotton and a few other items, so food and other essentials had to come from sources outside of the confines of the slavery. This group would be the merchants, overseers, suppliers, small farmers, and shippers.

The effects of slavery were widespread, that is why the war started. It was not so much that the politicians were the source of the dislike of slavery. It was the Northern people and the various reform movements against slavery and the Southern reaction to those movements. The logic is simple. For all intents and purposes the Civil War can be thought of us as an extension of politics. War occurred because a political decision could not be drafted to placate the Northern people and the Southern desire for slavery.

Simply, the war was fought because politics failed. With Manifest Destiny driving the white man and armies west and south, new territory was acquired. The South, who did more than their fair share in the fighting, was seeing their institutions excluded from the conquered territory and other areas. The point here is that slavery can be thought as a part of Southern culture.

Even non-slaveholders attained a status above that of slaves as long as that non-slave holder was white. In the South a white person could not be on the bottom of the social scale, that spot was reserved for the black slaves. Any attack on slavery was then seen as an attack on the non-slaveholder's status and honor. For instance the institution of slavery was banned above the Missouri Compromise line. The Wilmot Proviso is passed by the house three years after Texas is annexed and one year after the Oregon boundary dispute is settled. The house is dominated by Northerners and so we have the sectional attitudes intensifying over slavery.

The Compromise of 1850 was reached two years after the United States acquired California, New Mexico, and Utah. All but one of the compromise items dealt with slavery. The Kansas-Nebraska Act is pushed through the house by Douglas four years after the Compromise of 1850. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was designed to get the transcontinental project up and running. Douglas was motivated because he had please his constituency to get reelected.

Douglas merely manipulated Southern desire for expanding slavery by making it appear as if it were possible to gain a slave state out of the territories west of the Mississippi. Now, the issue of slavery had four key players in the arena. Those players are the represented of the North, the politicians of the North, the represented of the South, and the politicians of the South. The politicians do what they can to remain in office, thus the people's wishes then become very important. The Southern people believed in the usage of slavery.

That is to say that the Southern elite believed in the economic benefits of slavery and the non-slaveholding Southerners enjoyed elevated social status. The Northern people began to have a problem with the institution of slavery, whether that problem was initially founded on economic grounds and then took the guise of a moral fight is irrelevant at the moment. What matters is that slavery was the issue by which all the conflict was rooted. The Northern people did not want it to exist, or expand, and the Southern people wished for its continuance. The cause of the war was simple. The issue was slavery.

Slavery was ingrained in Southern culture and the Southern identity. By rejecting slavery, the Northerners were rejecting the very people who helped to carve it out. came about because he wanted to get reelected. To get reelected he had to please his constituency. To please his constituency he had to make sure the transcontinental railroad became a reality under his authority. To get the transcontinental railroad project going he needed territories to be organized on the railroads path. To organize the territories he needed the support of the Southerners and to get Southern support he had to bait them with the possibility that another slave state was a reality.

He did this with popular sovereignty, or that of letting the people decide the issue of slavery in the states as they were admitted to the union. This is an example of how a politician only did what he had to do to remain in office and how he had to use the issue of slavery to get what he wanted.