Paths to War

In order to understand how the United States was torn apart in a power struggle between the North and South, it is important to understand how passions from both sides escalated until the Civil War was inevitable. Political, economical and cultural differences mixed with passionate thoughts and feelings played a key factor. As years of the enforced servitude of African-Americans passed, Southern plantation owners continued to believe that the economy would fail without the labor of those enslaved individuals. Southern plantation owners were dependent on the forced labor of African-Americans in order to keep profiting from their plantations. The North thought slavery was an evil institution that could only bring harm to the country. And while there were some enslaved African-Americans in Northern states, Northerners mainly worked in trades, factories or on small farms where there was no need for forced labor. Slavery was by no means considered a way of life in the North, and Northerners saw little or no need for it.

After America won the Revolutionary War, winning their independence from Great Britain in 1783, a group of America’s most influential men came together to write the United States Constitution. While the Constitution was being written, laws were established that both protected as well as limited slavery. When the Constitution was formally accepted in 1788, slavery had already been abolished in: Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York and New Jersey. A majority of the men who wrote the Constitution believed that slavery would slowly fade away. By the late 1700s and early 1800s, most of the world was turning against slavery, except for the powerful American South, which was holding on tight. The United States was quickly becoming a nation divided. Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860. Shortly after he was elected, the Southern states seceded from the Union and the American Civil War began in the spring of 1861, and would eventually claim 623,000 lives.