The Controversy about the American Civil War - Research Paper Example

Due To What Extent was a US Civil War Inevitable? In the Event of a US CIVIL War, to What Extent was a Union Victory Inevitable? Characterized as “irrepressible,” “criminally stupid,” and/or “unnecessary bloodletting,” the controversy that surrounds the American Civil War, going deep to its very causes tells as much (Kurtz, 130). Discussed right from the top of Americas leadership down to the common man on the streets almost on a daily basis, the very inevitability of the war itself comes up much often than not, with hard questions of morality and leadership itself coming in-between. Like any other civil unrest the world over, the US Civil War was no different. Right from the American Revolution to the adoption of the Constitution, no one ever doubts that Americans, whether in the South or the North, had a common interest of establishing a prosperous nation. The means to achieving that very end, however, proved contentious, with sectionalism creeping in to widen the rifts between a people that fought their independence together barely a century earlier. To be sure, the origins of the civil war had roots in the first miserable boatload of African slaves into the American soil. The doubtful, as Sydney E. Ahlstrome notes, would be at pains to refute claims that slavery and the sustained mass moral condemnation of the institution was at heart of the conflict (649). Indeed without slavery, the war wouldn’t have occurred. In the 100 years or so of independence, the Southern states remained on an economy largely founded on cotton plantation agriculture aided by the institution of slavery. The North, though had own agricultural resources, was more advanced commercially and industrially, that one state after the other felt the need to abolished slavery. For a time it, it appeared that slavery was on its way to extinction with the remarks of Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson defining the South’s peculiar institution as a “necessary evil” (Roberts 53). To some, slavery was in every sense a “positive good” that generated a great deal of foreign exchange at no or low cost for the southerners. So intense were the gridlocks that when the Tariff legislation was finally introduced in the Congress and passed with the aid of Northern politicians, in effect raising the prices of imported goods in favor of the North produced goods against the wishes of Southerners long used to shipping their cotton to Europe in return for inexpensive boatloads of European goods, including clothes made from their own cotton, the southerners furor rose to near conflict 30 years to its actual dates. With the new tariff putting foreign goods out of financial reach, a theory that the South were no under obligation to obey federal laws that were not in their best interest began to spread. South Carolina went on record defying the tariff legislation with the threat to secede, sparking off the Nullification Crisis, defused only with the arrival of federal warships into Charleston Harbor at the orders of President Andrew Jackson (Olson160). The incident would set the stage for a constitutional battle of states’ rights against the notion of federal sovereignty; that is, whether or not the southern states had the right to leave the Union— a primary concern to most southern soldiers— and the continuation of their antebellum cultures in view of a tyrannical encroachment of the Federal government attempting to take away their rights to pursue their agricultural careers free from unfair taxation, regulations and/or abuse from the Northern industrialists. Put into perspective, the tariff question was but an open sore and a ready recipe that would raise the suspicion and mistrust of the Southerners about their Northern brethren and the federal government. That slavery was an offensive, social evil was out in the open; a fact long realized by the Congress, culminating into an enactment in 1808 banning the importation of African slaves (Micklos 35). The Act though fell short of banning the institution per se, leaving it to wither away on its own accord. Even so, the population in the South was already large enough to guarantee the needed labor supply. Along with the congress sending signals purging the practice, underground was a group of humanists agitating for the abolition of slavery; voices which only grew louder in the north as soon it became clear that the practice was but a moral mistake. The issue soon entered into the political arena, with the voices of reason outnumbering the resenting voices in the House of Representatives. For some sort of gentleman’s agreement, bribery and threats inclusive, the senate remained level with the admission of free and slave states into the union done concurrently. The issue would raise its ugly head yet again in the 1820 when Missouri applied for statehood. Arguments tightened on both sides, ending with the Missouri Compromise that allowed the state to join the union as a slave state on condition that Maine be admitted into the union as a free state (Engle and Krick 11). In the years that followed the Missouri Compromise, abolitionists grew into a fully-fledged movement, using every available means, from outright pulpit preaching right into the press, to drive their messages home (Rodriguez 161). Among the options explored, and in fact implemented at some point was the return of slaves back into Africa, with the modern Liberia serving as a testimony of a people shipped back from the Americas. Of course with abolitionist literature in the mainstream press, options regarding slavery, then confined mainly in the South, continued getting suppressed, with anxiety renting their airwaves due to the murderous slave revolts occurring everywhere from South America’s Haiti right into the Union territories of Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, to even closer in home with Nat Turner uprising in Virginia (Doak and Schwarz 52). Over and above the provocative, scandalous name calling that only sawed the seeds of discord between the South’s and the Northerners, the repetitive introduction of the Wilmot Proviso (1846-1847) in the congress in attempts to ban slavery in the territories to be acquired in the Mexican War would more than step-up the simmering temperatures (Rodriguez 517). Even though David Wilmot failed to achieve his target, the very repeated attempts to pass it into law was a but a cause célèbre in the south that the Northerners were out to wipe away their source of economic strength, and so their political power. As crises one after another continued to pile pressure on the South over slavery, their anger turned from mere rage to violence in enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which by then was considered an assault on the integrity of freedom, and so unconstitutional according to most Northern states (Rodriguez 301). A sort of a compromise between political leaders in the congress, the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 polarized the already strained relationship even further, with abolitionists taking their fight to greater heights, encouraging acts of civil disobedience that more than rendered the Act completely useless (Rodriguez 301). The publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852 depicting slavery as a relentless nightmare of sorrow and cruelty did accomplish much more than the author’s had anticipated; it inflamed the determination to end the institution that the south was much attached to and not willing to let go (Dillon 227). “The little lady who started this Great War” in Abraham Lincolns words would later sum up the power unleashed by Harriet Stowe’s novel (Cheuse 209). From the confines of Congress buildings down to the American walking on the streets, Harriet Stowe succeeded in bringing to the public domain the untold injustices of slavery, prompting feuds, more insults, accompanied by outright blockades and even more asylum to the runway slaves from the south. Considered another victory for the South after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 sponsored by Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, which basically eliminated the old Missouri Compromise of the 1820s, awoken the Northerners to the dangers of potential spread of slavery to virtually every new territory, in effect taking the hitherto moderate temperaments to a whole new level (Rodriguez 356). The actions of radical abolitionist John Brown stepped up the Southerner’s paranoia about North’s intentions toward their way of life, and The Harpers Ferry incident did well to reinforce the siege mentality of the South. In the congress, things weren’t any better. Charles Summer’s rant on May 19 1856, and his subsequent canning by Preston Brooks never made things any better (Rodriguez 202). The Dred Scott ruling in 1957, further inflamed sectional hatred, shaking the very foundation of the union (Ayers, et al. 294). To the Northerners, the ruling only bolstered their resolve to fight slavery. The underlying conflicts between the two sides would finally get fully exposed in the failure to compromise once again in the political arena. With key events such as Kansas Nebraska act of 1854, Wilmot proviso and the Dred Scott Supreme Court ruling of 1857 serving as the precursors, the election of Lincoln was but the final straw of a union in shambles. Had the warring factions utilize compromise in the election of Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War may have been postponed but not all together avoided, for the uneasy balance of power and antagonisms had been there within the system for a long time, and that either side would have had provocative declarations sooner or later. With regards to the victory in the event of a war, the Union had numerous advantages that more than gave them superiority over the confederate states. To begin with, the union had the support of 22 million people in the North in comparison to 9 million in the South, of which 3.5 million were slaves who had never supported the South’s course, and were not going to support them going forward (Muehlbauer and Ulbrich 178). Secondly, much of the firearms [approximately 94%] used in the entire union were being manufactured in the North. The Union was further aided by the fact that a number of slave states namely Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky remained loyal to the Union (McPherson 118). More critically, the ills of slavery were in the open, and that even among the 5.5 million whites, majority [two-thirds] of whom were non-slaveholders, quite a huge number were never committed to the Confederate cause. Accordingly, the will to make the necessary sacrifices grew thinner very minute of the war. A potential fifth of the population in the south, Slaves were but an asset to the union’s victory; throughout the war, their steady flow to the North and into the Union armies basically had major impacts on the ultimate outcome of the war. Work Cited Ahlstrome, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972. Print. Ayers, Edward, et al. American Passages: A History of the United States. Boston: Wadsworth, 2009. Print. Cheuse, Alan. Seeing Ourselves: Great Stories of Americas Past. Bedford, Mass.: Applewood Books, 2007. Print. Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock . The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Print. Doak, Robin Santos, and Philip Schwarz. Slave Rebellions. New York: Chelsea House Publications, 2006. Print. Engle, Stephen Douglas, and Robert Krick. The American Civil War: This Mighty Scourge of War. Oxford: Osprey, 2003. Print. Kurtz, Seymour. Jewish America. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985. Print. McPherson, Edward. The Political History of the United States of America During the Period of Reconstruction. Bradford: Applewood Books, 2009. Print. Micklos, John, Jr. American Indians and African Americans of the American Revolution —Through Primary Sources. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow Pub Inc., 2013. Print. Muehlbauer, Matthew, and David Ulbrich. Ways of War: American Military History from the Colonial Era to the Twenty First Century. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print. Olson, Ron. U. S. History, 1492-1865: From the Discovery of America through the Civil War. Franklin Lakes, NJ: Career Press, 2006. Print. Roberts, Justin. Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750-1807. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Print. Rodriguez, Junius. Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. 2. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2007. Print. Read More