1860-1861
PREFACE TO THE CIVIL WAR
The Fall of a House Divided
What motivated seven Southern states—and four others that followed after the war began—to declare that they were seceding from the United States and unifying to form the Confederacy? Twenty-first century historians agree on the centrality of the conflict over slavery—it was not just “a cause” of the war; it was “the cause.”
The principal political battle leading to Southern secession was over whether slavery would be permitted to expand into newly acquired Western territories that would someday become states. Initially Congress had admitted new states into the Union in pairs, with one being a slave state and the other free. This had kept a sectional balance in the Senate but not in the House of Representatives, as free states outstripped slave states in population. At mid-19th century, the free-versus-slave status of the new territories was a critical issue, both for the North, where anti-slavery sentiment had grown, and for the South, where the fear of slavery’s abolition had grown. The development of white Southern nationalism in the preceding decades was an added influence leading to secession and the formation of the Confederacy.
Despite not being on the ballot in 10 states, Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election. His victory triggered declarations of secession by seven slave states of the Deep South; the economies of all of these states were based on a cotton industry powered by enslaved labor. They formed the Confederate States of America (CSA) after Lincoln was elected in November 1860, before he took office in March 1861.
Nationalists in the North and “Unionists” in the South refused to accept the declarations of secession. No foreign government ever recognized the Confederacy. Scholars agree that the primary reason the North rejected secession was to preserve the Union, a cause based on American nationalism.
The U.S. government, under President James Buchanan, refused to relinquish its forts that were in territory claimed by the Confederacy. The war itself began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces bombarded Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.
As a panel of historians emphasized in 2011, “while slavery and its various and multifaceted discontents were the primary cause of disunion, it was disunion itself that sparked the war.”
Other important factors were partisan politics, abolitionism, expansionism, economics, and modernization in the Antebellum period, all of which were tied to the core issue of slavery.
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