A Virginian slaveholder wrote a new tariff in , which was passed and generally well-received by Southern members of Congress as it stipulated a record-low rate. Thus, at the time of war, Southerners had no real reason to complain with regards to tariffs : a plantation owner in Louisiana could export his cotton to Europe at the lowest tariff rate instituted since Most human conflicts are, in some way.
In this case, the money issue centered around potential losses Southern titans of agribusiness would experience if slavery was abolished at the federal level. Federally mandated emancipation would require a majority of free states in the US Senate—something Southern lawmakers fought tooth-and-nail to impede. As a result, the number of free and slave-states was kept equal until , when the count reached 15 and 14, respectively. This imbalance exacerbated tensions between North and South significantly, reducing Southern leaders to a culture of extreme paranoia.
Secession, in this sense, was very much a preemptive move. The Southern aristocracy feared the impending election of Abraham Lincoln would ultimately bring about nationwide emancipation. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.
They may be correct. But at the time of its delivery, Southern leaders heard these words and thought one thing: Lincoln aims to abolish slavery at the federal level. Lincoln aims to destroy our way of life.
So, as this preemptive secession commenced, Southern state governments issued declarations of secession that placed the preservation of slavery front and center.
The declaration of secession for Texas is perhaps the most dogmatic. On Feb. All, however, passionately pontificated on the necessity of preserving an institution of slavery; and that no such preservation could be maintained within the Union as it was then organized. Ironically, secession, and the creation of a Confederacy was the only conceivable way of maintaining the status quo. In a last-ditch effort to deny the integrality of slavery to Southern secession, a contemporary Confederate sympathizer will inevitably raise the issue of the Corwin amendment.
The Southern states wanted to assert their authority over the federal government so they could abolish federal laws they didn't support, especially laws interfering with the South's right to keep slaves and take them wherever they wished. The South wished to take slavery into the western territories, while the North was committed to keeping them open to white labor alone. Meanwhile, the newly formed Republican party, whose members were strongly opposed to the westward expansion of slavery into new states, was gaining prominence.
For three long years, from to , Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia staved off invasions and attacks by the Union Army of the Potomac commanded by a series of ineffective generals until Ulysses S.
Grant came to Virginia from the Western theater to become general in chief of all Union armies in In the meantime Union armies and river fleets in the theater of war comprising the slave states west of the Appalachian Mountain chain won a long series of victories over Confederate armies commanded by hapless or unlucky Confederate generals.
In General William Tecumseh Sherman led his army deep into the Confederate heartland of Georgia and South Carolina, destroying their economic infrastructure while General George Thomas virtually destroyed the Confederacy's Army of Tennessee at the battle of Nashville. By the spring of all the principal Confederate armies surrendered, and when Union cavalry captured the fleeing Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Georgia on May 10, , resistance collapsed and the war ended.
The long, painful process of rebuilding a united nation free of slavery began. Civil War Article. National Archives The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states.
Library of Congress For three long years, from to , Robert E. James McPherson is a leading Civil War historian.
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