The Civil War: an Inevitable Conflict

The bloodiest time in history for America was during The American Civil War; a time when Americans fought against themselves for their own rights in which they believed they were entitled to. To many it would be considered shocking and absurd to say the Civil War was something that could have avoided – and they’re right. The Civil War was an unavoidable and ultimately inevitable conflict that was essential to the evolution of our nation. The differences between the North and the South, economically and politically, were majors players on why the two divided halves of the America could not prosper together at that time; that and the fact that they had previously tried to compromise also makes the Civil War the inevitable and undeniable conclusion of this melting-pot of problems brewing between the two sides. Excellent introduction There were many differences between the antebellum North and South regions of America, and many of these were economical. The most obvious of which is that the North was, for the most part, industrial; while the South on the other hand was economically dependent of the production of staple crops (primarily cotton). The production of cotton in the South with the advent of the cotton gin soared, causing an increase of labor required; this lead to a dependency on slave labor in the south. Slavery was something the North often looked down upon and also held little or no value to them. How could a nation survive with no conflict when there were two very distinct sides that held opposing economic ideals and beliefs? In terms of politics, there were polarizing differences between the North and the South with their ideals and philosophies. Political parties at the time right before the start of the Civil War often catered to either the North or the South specifically; for example there was the Republican Party which was first organized in 1854 in opposition to Stephen Douglas’s introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Act into Congress. The Republican Party exclusively catered to the benefits of northerners. They favored internal improvement, building transportation routes between the north and the west while relying on the southerners to foot the bill (while receiving no benefit of their own). The election of the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was the last straw for the southerners politically. Why would they want to be part of a nation with a leader that would not fairly and accurately represent them? Excellent paragraph In spite of these differences, the North and the South tried to compromise with each other VIA a series of legislations. They tried to exhaust their other options before going to war, like diplomatically attempting to compromise; but it ultimately only succeeded in temporarily putting off the war, though not preventing it. For example they established the Kansas-Nebraska act which created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska in 1854. They included the idea of popular sovereignty into the proposal which established that settlers could vote on whether or not to allow slavery. They included this idea in hope that it would ease relations between the North and the South. Though in reality all it did was create conflict, opponents of the act denounced it as a concession to the slave power of the south. The heinous amount of American blood that was shed during the American Civil War was nothing but inevitable. The polarizing differences between the North and the South both politically and economically are what ultimately drove the two sections of the nation apart. The failure to compromise between these differences diplomatically is what led them to come to the undeniable conclusion that war was unavoidable.