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Essay On The Causes Of The Civil War

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Rachna Shah Causes of the Civil War Throughout the history of time, the wars that the United States have fought with include separate entities, powerful nations, and groups of European allies, but never before a war within itself: a civil war. What had prompted this war was not simply slavery, the obvious cause, but time itself, and the gradual increase of state support for such a war to occur. The American Civil War was, simply stating, a struggle to determine whether or not the country should illegalize the institution of slavery or not. For about two hundred years, the people within the United States had had slave states and free states, slave territories and free territories co-exist with one another. However, other more minor factors that …show more content…

Thus, as soon as Abraham Lincoln was elected President, word spread in the South that Lincoln was going to use powers from the federal government to put a legal end to slavery. Thus, the Northerners would be overpowering the Southerners, who apparently, would have no more voice anymore in this debate--thus, they would not have the incommensurate influence they once had. One of the immediate causes of the Civil War was when seven Southern states (South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas) declared secession, thus formally removing themselves from being part of the United States; they elected Jefferson Davis as their president, and all this took place before Lincoln became president and could do anything about the matter. Another one of the causes of the Civil War was the reaction from the decision of the Dred Scott case, which stated that African-Americans, whether they were slaves or free, did not have the ability to become American citizens, and thus did not have the same rights as the American citizen (such as the right to sue in federal court). Also, Supreme Court Chief Justice Taney declared that states did not have the right to prevent a slaveholder from residing within a free state and practicing slavery there, practically allowing for slavery to take place across

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