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

Act from being pursued, but without much success. Although this Act was a horrible blot in America, it raised even more awareness for slavery in the North and helped people understand the complexity and torture that slavery is and was. Additionally, slave catchers would find a random, free black man and claim his as his slave, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Oftentimes, judges would say a black person was a slave merely because they got paid double what they would if they said that person was free, and there was nothing the blacks could do to help themselves as they were not allowed to testify in court, so many ended up in Canada to flee slave catchers.
    Stephen Douglas desired presidency and believed the Kansas-Nebraska Act would help his chances.

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 The Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise and led to the obliteration of the Whig Party, negated treaties with Indians, and the near destruction of the northern wing of the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

War.
    Victim to the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dred Scott Decision is known as one of the worst conclusions in Supreme Court history. The case utterly worsened sectional divisions in the states, as Southerners celebrated the decision and Northerners condemned it. Dred Scott had been a slave in Missouri and eventually moved to Illinois, where he lived for over ten years. In those ten years, Scott gained himself a wife and children, and suddenly his former owner was striving to force him and his family back into slavery. The case took many years to get to the Supreme Court, and eventually it was ruled that Congress could, in fact, not ban slavery in territories, and that Scott’s ten year plus residency in a free territory did not make him a free man. Sadly, Scott was forced back into slavery as were his wife and children, who had never been the victims of it before. The Judge who delivered the verdict, Tauny, spent four hours reading his ruling, and essentially stated that slaves are life long property, and that property may be taken wherever the owner wishes, and whenever the owner wishes to do so. Once again, the Dred Scott Decision infuriated the North, creating more of a divide between the two areas.
    Quite parallel from most of his time, John Brown aspired the immediate abolition of slavery in the United States. Brown could be considered to have been an intense character, as he intended to organize a raid at Harper’s Ferry, where slaves would be supplied guns to kill their masters. There was a chance of this being somewhat successful for it being the childish plan it is, if only Brown had not forgotten to mention his grand plan to the slaves. Once the raid proved to have been a catastrophe, Brown was hanged, which exacerbated still growing tensions between the North and the South, as the South was shocked when the North reacted in such a melancholy way to his death. While the North mourned Brown’s death, attempted to make him a martyr, and showed support for slave revolts, the South grew more and more outraged at their supposed fellow citizens’ attitudes. This man had just endeavoured to kill slave owners in the South, and the North was upset over his death. This mad Southerners furious and only made situations between the two worse.
    Lastly, the election of 1860 proved also to be a cause of the Civil War because of its winner.

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

War.
    Without the Civil War ending slavery in the country, America might be in a completely different condition than it is today. Slavery may have been the overlying argument for its beginning, but many other events and actions assisted in the eruption of war between the long feuding soon to be Union and Confederacy.