North Vs South Civil War Essay

In 1861, seven Southern slave states secede from the United States. War breaks out three months later when Confederate soldiers attack Fort Sumter, a Federal armory. The war waged on for four more years with a conservative estimate of 700,000 collective American lives being lost. The question must be asked, what caused the bloodiest war in American history? Slavery was clearly the dominant cause of the war. But what were the underlying causes of this brutal war? Southerners claim States Rights reigned supreme as the cause for secession and while that played a major part, a clash of values and the ineffectuality of all compromise made must be the true reason. The North and South were quickly separating into starkly different regions, the North becoming industrial and the South remaining agrarian, and all attempts to recuperate differences were

The North is characterized as a cold rocky place, largely unsuitable for the farming lifestyle. Whereas the South had huge swaths of farmable land and a warm climate. These realities led to vastly different economies. The framework of the North’s economy being factories and the South’s stemming from manual labor. As the North modernized itself, through the building of railroads and automation of factories, its Southern counterpart remained stagnant as the result of an agrarian economy driven by slave labor. With these immutable environments forcing the North to industrialize and the South to farm, a division was created. The division was the need for slaves. A place built around factories is not in such dire need for free labor as the huge farms of the South are. The South lost the second they decided to continue on the abominable path of slavery while refusing the alternate option of industry. Physical realities soon transformed into political ones and the game of prolonging the Armageddon of our country