A House Divided: Slavery, Sectional Tensions, and the Causes of the Civil War

On April 12, 1861, squadrons of soldiers opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. Major Robert Anderson surrendered the fort 33 hours later. Sumter was one of the United States’ last outposts in the recently formed Confederacy of former Southern states. With its fall, the American Civil War began. Lasting four years, the Civil War tore apart what Abraham Lincoln had termed the “bonds of affection” between the North and South. Yet it was not a spontaneous occurrence. What incited the Confederacy to fire on Fort Sumter had its roots in deeply entrenched divisions that had been on the verge of bursting for years. The Civil War owed its existence to three crucial factors: the never-ending debate over slavery, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and sectional tensions fueled by the Republican Party. Each of these contributed majorly to the development of what would become the most devastating war fought on American soil.
The fundamental cause of the Civil War was the debate over slavery. As early as 1837, South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun stated that “We of the South…cannot surrender our institutions [of slavery]. To maintain the existing relations between the two races…is indispensable to the peace and happiness of both. It cannot be subverted without drenching the country in blood.” Moreover, every sectional pre-Civil War crisis had slavery at its roots. Henry Clay’s Compromise of 1850, meant to quell Southern radicals’ calls of secession over the issue of slavery, addressed slavery in each of its provisions. John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, which deepened Southern dislike of the Northern Republican Party, was meant to start a slave uprising. And when South Carolina seceded from the Union in December 186...

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...raska Act not resulted in a violent outcome, the pre-Civil War years would not have had as much turmoil. And were it not for the partisan divide between the North and South, Abraham Lincoln’s election would have been far less consequential. But nearly all the causes boiled down to the fundamental differences between Northern and Southern society. The North and South were two cultures whose economies and lifestyles – one industrial, the other agricultural – were inherently different. They were two diverging societies with differing approaches to social class and work. The debate over slavery, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the partisan tensions were all manifestations of that gaping divide in lifestyles. Compounded with an inability to compromise, that gap only grew wider and wider. And eventually, it would be that gap that have catastrophic consequences for everyone.