What was civil war fought over

This week marks the th anniversary of Robert E. In this way, the historiography of the Civil War is somewhat unique. Just how pervasive are these Confederate mythologies? An informal survey conducted in by James W. In its constitution , Confederate leaders explicitly provided for the federal protection of slaveholding:. South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union. On Dec. Pennsylvania , in which the US Supreme Court ruled that state authorities could not be forced to help return fugitive slaves to the South.

Ensuing individual state legislation in New England would double down on that very ruling, expressly forbidding state officials from enforcing the federal Fugitive Slave Acts , or the use of state jails to detain fugitive slaves. In effect, South Carolina seceded because the federal government would not overturn abolitionist policies in Northern states. Another strain of Confederate apologia asserts secession inspired by high taxes, in the form of heavy tariffs. Once again, the neo-Confederates are wrong, and South Carolinian history proves it.

The state first raised the threat of secession in and , events known collectively as the Nullification Crisis. South Carolina declared the federal tariffs of and unconstitutional, and therefore null within state borders.

No other state government backed the move, president Jackson threatened force, and South Carolina abandoned the idea. No matter! 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.

Army and Navy overwhelmingly resigned to fight for their individual states in the Confederacy. But the right most important to the South, most necessary to southern lives, culture, and economy, most threatened, and most important to defend, was the right of the states to protect slavery.

Another argument concerns slavery in the territories. The South ardently desired to expand slavery into the Louisiana Territory in as well as those territories wrested from Mexico in the Mexican-American War in The North just as ardently opposed and derailed this expansion. Without question, this is considered one of the tripwires that caused the Civil War. And it was about slavery.

Viral abolitionism in America, anathema to the South, awoke in the s, when William Lloyd Garrison established his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator , in Boston. Centered in New England, Philadelphia, and New York, abolitionists had steadily grown in numbers and influence over the next three decades. By , abolition was seen by southerners as a monstrous threat, because what abolitionists wanted to abolish was slavery.

The Compromise of , which tightened the Fugitive Slave Law, obligated those in the North to return fugitive slaves to their masters in the South. Despite stiff penalties, some northerners defied the law, creating a relay system, the Underground Railroad, to pass runaway slaves from house to house to freedom in Canada. This blatant defiance of law by northerners looked to slaveholders like a reason to secede and, if necessary, go to war. And it had everything to do with slavery.

Northern aggression was to become another strong argument as to why the South seceded and went to war against the North. And, in the final two years of the war, a large reason the North was aggressively invading the South was not just to win the war and save the Union, but to blot out slavery. Finally, another argument often proposed as a cause for war is the election of Abraham Lincoln. At the first sign he had been elected, they would secede.

South Carolina, the most radical of the southern states, left first, in December , followed by five other Deep South slave states Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana in January , and then Texas in early February.

But Lincoln had no desire to invade the South, and he told them so. His sole objective was to save the Union. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors. And so they went to war, not so much as to leave the Union but to save slavery. In late , believing it had become essential to win the war, Lincoln signed an Emancipation Proclamation freeing all the slaves in the Confederate states.

The war then became not just a war to save the Union but a war to end slavery. These six reasons make it clear that whatever the causes were thought to be, they all connected back to slavery. There would not have been a civil war if slavery had not existed. Use Handout A: Point-Counterpoint Graphic Organizer to answer historical reasoning questions about this point-counterpoint.

General Correspondence. In an effort to gather fresh supplies and relieve the pressure on the Confederate garrison at Vicksburg, Mississippi, Confederate General Robert E. Lee launched a daring invasion of the North in the summer of He was defeated by Union General George G.

Meade in a three-day battle near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania that left nearly 51, men killed, wounded, or missing in action. While Lee's men were able to gather the vital supplies, they did little to draw Union forces away from Vicksburg, which fell to Federal troops on July 4, In November of , President Lincoln traveled to the small Pennsylvania town and delivered the Gettysburg Address, which expressed firm commitment to preserving the Union and became one of the most iconic speeches in American history.

Fact 7: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee did not meet on the field of battle until May of Grant , and Virginia born Robert E. The two men had very little in common. Lee was from a well respected First Family of Virginia, with ties to the Continental Army and the founding fathers of the nation.

While Grant was from a middle-class family with no martial or family political ties. Lee was offered command of the federal army amassing in Washington, in , but he declined the command and threw his hat in with the Confederacy.

Lee's early war career got off to a rocky start, but he found his stride in June of after he assumed command of what he dubbed the Army of Northern Virginia. Grant, on the other hand, found early success in the war but was haunted by rumors of alcoholism. By , the two men were by far the best generals on their respective sides.

In March of , Grant was promoted to lieutenant general and brought to the Eastern Theater of the war, where he and Lee engaged in a relentless campaign from May of to Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House eleven months later. The war bankrupted much of the South, left its roads, farms, and factories in ruins, and all but wiped out an entire generation of men who wore the blue and the gray.

More than , men died in the Civil War, more than any other war in American history. The southern states were occupied by Union soldiers, rebuilt, and gradually re-admitted to the United States over the course of twenty difficult years known as the Reconstruction Era.

It was clear to many that it was only a matter of time before slavery would be fully abolished. As the war drew to a close, but before the southern states were re-admitted to the United States, the northern states added the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution.

The amendments are also known as the "Civil War Amendments. The 14th Amendment has played an ongoing role in American society as different groups of citizens continue to lobby for equal treatment by the government. The United States government has identified battles that had a significant impact on the larger war.

Many of these battlefields have been developed—turned into shopping malls, pizza parlors, housing developments, etc. Since the end of the Civil War, veterans and other citizens have struggled to preserve the fields on which Americans fought and died.