THE BREAK OUT OF AMERICAN CIVIL WAR.

David Ezekiel Caña Carillo

BSED SOCIAL STUDIES 3A

The northern and southern regions of the United States had fundamentally different economies in the
middle of the 19th century, even though the country was going through a period of rapid growth.

While agriculture in the North was largely confined to small-scale farms and manufacturing and industry
were well-established, the South's economy was dependent on a system of large-scale farming that
required the labor of Black enslaved people to grow specific crops, mainly cotton and tobacco. Many
southerners believed that the continuation of slavery in America—and hence the foundation of their
economy—was in jeopardy as a result of growing abolitionist sentiment in the North following the 1830s
and northern hostility to slavery's expansion into the new western territories.

the USA in 1854,. Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which essentially opened all new territories
to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict. Pro- and anti-slavery
forces struggled violently in “Bleeding Kansas,” while opposition to the act in the North led to the
formation of the Republican Party, a new political entity based on the principle of opposing slavery’s
extension into the western territories. After the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott case (1857)
confirmed the legality of slavery in the territories, the abolitionist John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry in
1859 convinced more and more southerners that their northern neighbors were bent on the destruction
of the “peculiar institution” that sustained them. Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 was the
final straw, and within three months seven southern states–South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida,
Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas–had seceded from the United States.