Factions Leading To The Outbreak Of The Civil War - Essay Example

They took advantage of the new lands, railroads and natural resources, and they strengthened their economic and political interest. The Civil War started on April 12, 1861, when the Confederates (Southerners) bombarded Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. Initiated by the crisis between 1860 and 1861 which occurred in the autumn of 1859, John Brown and cohorts took the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia under seizure, targeting to summon slaves over to be armed safely at a fortification built on a mountain.

Brown encouraged them to put an end to unwanted slavery and forced labor suffered at the hands of their slavedrivers in the South. Through the command of Gen. Robert Lee, one of the finest generals at the time, the Confederates managed to defeat the Yankees (Northerners) on a number of incidents that include the suppression of the band of raiders led by Brown who was himself tried and executed. Paranoia toward malicious intentions was claimed to have transpired between the Northerners and the Southerners due primarily to inequality between the two regions, the issue of slavery, and secession by the south.

The various states in the North and in the South had conflicting interests. While the North was industrial, democratic, and progressive, on the other hand, the South remained agricultural, aristocratic, and conservative. A majority of Northerners viewed the inhabitants of the South as indolent, poorly educated, and misbehaved people who would always contradict ideas and possibilities which could enable the United States to achieve its goals with capitalism. Northern Americans opposed black slavery because they did not need slave labor in their factories whereas Southern Americans needed slaves to cultivate their vast plantations of cotton, tobacco, and rice.

On a rough estimate, about 80% of the population in the South toiled in agriculture and a significant mass of southern wealth was reported to have been invested slave trade and acquisition of lands to expand territories. Pieces of cotton produced via southern regulations were sold to northern and European textile mills, largely imparting a favorable equilibrium in the country’s potential in the aspect of trade as rich slaveholders obtained extensive commercial, social, and political dominion over their region.

Thus, during the 1850s, several white southerners had come to adopt the principle that considers bondage to servility to be a “positive good” either for the slave or his master. Besides labor control, slavery also functioned as a means for the Southern Americans to settle with the social order in which division of class among the whites in the southern society seemed to have become abolished for having a common stake in the system of slavery. Regardless of economic status, white people of the South were justified as equal among themselves by virtue of or fact with the prevailing black slavery of that period.

For this ground and the anxiety toward dissonant consequences, once black servants were freed, the Confederates all the more agreed to necessitate slavery and defended this position against their northern counterparts. Consequently, the Yankees of the North were established with a stereotypical impression of being indifferent or partaking with negligible concern about family matters, as if all they ever cared for was to sustain personal extravagance whereby economic interests were sought to prioritize luxury in living.