Was the american civil war entirely caused by economic struggle?

Páginas: 17 (4043 palabras) Publicado: 13 de septiembre de 2012
The U.S. Civil War was fought between 1861 and 1865, and was a turning point in U.S. history. The South seceded from the Union in 1860-61, stating that Lincoln’s election made it impossible for them to remain in a Union dominated by the Republican Party.

In many ways, economic issues created the rising tensions between North and the South that developed during the first half of the 19thcentury. An example of this is the Nullification Affair, where the congress imposed a heavy taxation to English imports in 1828. The Southerners were furious about this decision because the English people will start to buy cotton to other countries, and also if the production of cotton stopped, the slaves would have no work to do. So, in response to this, South Carolina interposed her Statesovereignty and made null the tariff. The U.S customs officials were not allowed to enforce the law, so President Jackson prepared an invasion of South Carolina. At the end the Congress reduced the tariff until it was acceptable for the South. Another economic problem was that Republicans wanted to keep more states as free, while the South were obviously opposing to this idea. If the whole of the U.S.turned as a free slave country, the south would be destroyed economically, as all the money that they had spend in slaves would be wasted.

However, while economic factors were important in causing tensions between North and South, there were other elements that contributed to the Civil War. Politically, the North and South held widely different views over issues such as State’s rights, whereassocially, slavery was seen as a terrible sin by the North. These opposing view points led directly to the Civil War in 1861.

Economic issues were a central factor in the build-up to the U.S. Civil War. The tensions caused by this economic struggle were so great that they finally divided the nation in 1860-61. One of the main economic factors was slavery, because both countries had differentpoints of view towards it as they had different economies. The Southern economy was based on slaves while the North one believed on working as Free States and developing the industry much more. The south spended lots of money in slaves, in 1600 slaves were bought at $2 and sold at $150 and after slave trade was declared illegal prices went even higher so he South spend even more. Slavery broughttension between both sides because once again they had different points of view but the problem with this point was that if the South stopped working with slaves their economy would be ruin given that all the money they invested on them would be lost.

Therefore, the existence of slavery caused economic tensions between the North and the South that led to the Civil War in 1861,given that theyboth have different points of view towards slavery and production .It was very difficult that such different economies could co-exist in a same country.

As it was just mentioned, slavery was one important point because it shows how different North and South were, the South wanted to stay with slavery because they made lots of money from slavery and if they let them free no one would do theirwork. Also they invested lots of money on slaves and letting them free would ruin the South. But the North saw slavery in a very different way; they thought that it was inefficient given that the north without slavery was developing, industrially, much more rapidly. Other argument they had was that a very small group benefited from slavery, those were the planters. They also told the south that theslaves worked slowly in protest so it would benefit hem to free them and pay them for their work because it would fasten their production. Therefore slavery was an issue that caused lots of tension between North and South because they had very different points of view and both could not co-exist in one country so in the end this led to Civil War.

Talking about the economic factors another...
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