Factors contributing to the outbreak of the American Civil War

American History - Civil War

THE MAIN CAUSAL FACTORS of the AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

The American Civil War was a watershed event in the history of the nascent America, but contemporary historians focus almost exclusively on slavery as its only root cause. Undoubtedly, slavery played a very significant role in the developing antagonism between the northern and southern American states, but at least two other factors were equally responsible for the deterioration of interstate relations that ultimately led to war.

Namely, the fundamental issue of state sovereignty against the growing authority of the federal government and the very different life style and political and economic bases of life in the southern states as compared with those that shaped life in the North (Hartshorne 2005).

The Role of Slavery as a Root Cause of the American Civil War:

In many respects, the outbreak of the American Civil war was attributable directly to the invention of the cotton engine (or "gin") by Eli Whitney toward the end of the 18th century. Prior to that, cotton production was so unprofitable that American slavery might very well have been phased out long before 1861 for purely economic reasons (Hartshorne 2005).

American cotton grew in two specific varieties known as black seed cotton and green seed cotton, with very different economic value. Black seed cotton fibers were long and relatively easy to separate by hand from their seeds; green seed cotton on the other hand, produced much shorter, stickier fibers that were so difficult and painstakingly slow to hand separate that the maximum possible output could probably not have supported the high cost of procuring and transporting African slaves to the American continent, notwithstanding the fundamental moral issues militating against the institution of slavery in the first place. Black seed cotton grew only in the coastal southern states; the inland states were limited to growing green seed cotton, exclusively. When Whitney introduced his cotton gin, it transformed the profitability of growing green seed cotton practically overnight by increasing the amount of cotton fiber that could be separated from seed by several factors of ten (Lakwete 2004). The immediate result was a dramatic increase in cotton production and in the number of southern plantations eager to fill the needs of the rapidly growing textile industry, both on the American continent as well as in European countries, such as Britain, in particular. By the time the serious conflict began brewing between the North and South that would eventually lead to the Civil War, slavery had become absolutely indispensable to the economy and way of life throughout the southern cotton-producing states.

While slavery was not exclusive to the southern states, it was never an important factor in the northern states, primarily because their economies relied on industrial manufacturing rather than agricultural production. Unskilled slave labor is (aside from the moral issues of human enslavement) perfectly suitable for agricultural harvesting; by comparison, modernized industry requires more highly skilled labor for which slavery is not particularly helpful (Lakwete 2004). Just as the Civil Rights era of the next century featured northern involvement in rectifying the social and political oppression of American blacks leading to civil rights legislation, increasing numbers of northerners traveled to southern states during the decade preceding the Civil War to present the moral argument against human slavery. In conjunction with those efforts, they further antagonized the South by assisting escaped slaves make their way North through the underground railway and encouraged them to learn to read and write, both of which were considered notorious crimes in the southern states.

The Role of Federalism, Foreign Tariffs and the Western Territories:

The period before the American Civil war coincided with the evolution of the modern American federal court system, particularly with respect to the nature of the relationship and the respective authority of the federal government and sovereign state courts (Murrin 2006). Landmark Supreme Court cases had begun chipping away at the rights of states to decide issues related to slavery, but equally serious were the other threats imposed by federal authority on the economic independence of the southern states.

In general, the concept of political democracy and government by the people was embraced much more in the American North than in the South. Specifically, the southern (white) population was largely uneducated poor who owned no land of their own but worked for wealthy plantation owners from whom they leased small parcels of land. The political climate of the South resembled European aristocracy much more than American democracy, in that a very small wealthy segment of the population controlled virtually every facet of state politics (Murrin 2006).

With every exercise of federal authority that usurped their autonomy and control over state affairs, resentment toward the North grew among the influential decision makers in the South. Perhaps no single issue apart from slavery antagonized the southern states more than the taxes and import/export tariffs imposed by the federal government on foreign trade designed to balance foreign trade competition. These measures applied equally to all the American states but were felt much more directly in the southern agricultural states. Whereas the industrialized North manufactured most of the infrastructure and equipment necessary for its own economy, the South relied much more heavily on imported European products for which it paid with cotton in trade. The federal imposition of taxes and tariffs hit the South on both ends of these transactions, threatening to undermine the economic viability of the southern states, even without abolishing slavery (Murrin 2006)