Events That Led to the Civil War

This research paper summarizes, explains, and analyzes the principal events that led to the American Civil War. Between 1820 and 1860, the sectional rivalry between the North and the South intensified. That rivalry coalesced around the failure of the political system to arrange a lasting accommodation over the extension of slavery into the western territories. The economic and social forces which ultimately undermined the basis for political compromise between North and South gained momentum during the two decades 1820 to 1840; but political balance between North and South was maintained by the two party system during that period. A much more serious series of crises erupted in the 1840s and early 1850s over the extension of slavery that accompanied the expansion through conquest and settlement of the West during those decades. During the mid to late 1850s, the advent of the civil war became inevitable because of the fragmentation of the political center and a decline in the quality of its leadership which proved incapable after 1854 of holding the Union together against escalating confrontational and polarizing pressures.

Before 1820, the institution of slavery did not present significant political or constitutional issues in the United States. Many of the founding fathers were slaveholders, as were a number of later Presidents. The Constitution recognized obliquely the property rights of slaveowners in their slave

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ern concerns were somewhat allayed by the dominance in Washington of the Democratic Party, which repealed the charter of the national bank, generally heeded the interests of small farmers and businessmen and paid more than lip service to states' rights. The South strongly supported the decision by Democratic President James Polk (1845-1849) to go to war with Mexico. The territories acquired by the American victory in that war, California and New Mexico, produced an intense sectional struggle over whether they would or would not be open to slavery. Northern abolitionists pressed for the enactment of the 1846 Wilmot Proviso which would have barred slavery from such newly acquired territories, but Polk and southern Senators blocked its passage. Polk's successor, General Zachary Taylor, a southern Whig and a slaveowner, proved, said McPherson, to be "a free soil wolf in the clothing of a state's rights sheep" (66). Taylor died in July 1850, but his successor, northern Whig Millard Fillmore, worked out with Congress the second Missouri Compromise of 1850 under which California was admitted as a free state and New Mexico as a slave state, slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia, and a pro-southern Fugitive Slave Law was p
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Approximate Word count = 1562
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)