Civil War Dbq

Considered one of the most prevalent turning points in American history, the Civil War impacted every person in that era, and continues to do so today. While slavery is well-known to have been the principal cause of the war as a whole, multifarious reasonings were also responsible for the blood stain in history. The Fugitive Slave Act heightened flourishing tensions between the North and the South, as both held quite differing opinions. The Act stated that any slave who escaped to freedom in the North could be retrieved by slave catchers and taken back to their owners in the South; previously, states had passed acts against assisting slave catchers, so many northerners were extremely outraged. Mobs broke out in attempts to prevent this

This bill opened the Kansas territory to popular sovereignty, and Douglas hoped that would win the support of the South. The Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise and led to the obliteration of the Whig Party, negated treaties with Indians, and the near destruction of the northern wing of the Democratic Party. In consequence to the Act, “Bleeding Kansas” occurred, which included a battleground of sectional politics, proslavery Missourians who crossed over the border and took over the territorial legislature with their votes, and Northerners founded free-soil communities, which opposed the expansion of slavery. By the summer of 1865, open fighting and warfare ruptured; some even say this was the true beginning of the Civil

The election held four candidates: Stephen Douglas, John Breckinridge, John Bell, and Abraham Lincoln. Douglas won the nomination, yet Southerners nominated Breckinridge. Border and Southern state Whigs created the Constitutional Union Party where Bell was entered, and Lincoln represented Republicans as a moderate, someone who supposedly was not on one side or the other. While Breckinridge and Lincoln represented supreme positions on slavery, Douglas and Bell tried to find a sort of middle ground. Lincoln ended up winning the election with a lousy thirty-eight percent of the vote by practically winning over every part of the North; his name was not even on the ballot in nine Southern states, which angered Southerners since a man whom did not even show up on their ballot had won the presidency. As most are aware, Lincoln then took various steps to eventually emancipating slavery in the United States, which officially began the American Civil