Civil War Dbq

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The American Civil War took place during 1861-1865. There were many disagreements between the North and South that led up to the beginning of the war. The three major factors that led to the war were: land expansion, failed compromises, and freedom versus slavery. These three aspects had the biggest effect on the rising tension and sectionalism occurring between the Union and the Confederacy and contributed the most to the start of the Civil War.
The second factor was land expansion. Western expansion created tension and between the North and South regions of settled America. With the expansion of land comes the question of slavery, and whether or not a state should be a free state or a slave state. An example of this can be found during
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There were three main compromises that led to the war, the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas Nebraska Act. All of these compromises failed in one way or another thus creating tension that led to the Civil War. The first compromise was the Missouri Compromise. Created in 1819, its purpose was to resolve the issue of unbalanced congress. The compromise named Missouri as a slave state, and Maine as a free state. This was to keep the number of pro and anti slavery congressmen equal. The compromise also created the 36 30 line, which stated that anything north of the line would be free land, and anything south of it would allow slavery. This aspect of the compromise was later eliminated by the Compromise of 1850. With the addition of California as a free state, the government needed to reevaluate in order to keep congress unbiased. This led to the creation of another compromise that would soon fail. The compromise entailed that California would be a free state but the Fugitive Slave Law, or Bloodhound Bill would have to be enforced. The new law demanded that all citizens, northern and southern would be required to return all runaway slaves back to their “rightful owner.” The northern states were infuriated by this ruling, thus creating more tension that would ultimately lead to the Civil …show more content…
The question of whether or not a state should allow slavery or outlaw it weighed heavily on the relationship between the north and the south. The north, who favored freedom, wanted newly added states to be free. The south wanted new states to be slave states. The constant conflict of a state’s slave status occurred each time a new state or territory was added to the land owned by the American government, leading to even more issues between the Union and the Confederacy, ultimately leading to the South’s secession and the start of the Civil War.
In conclusion, the three main factors that led to the beginning of the civil war were land expansion, failed compromises, and abolition versus slavery. These three factors each played a role in creating tension between the North and the South, and also caused an increase in sectionalism which ultimately led to the South’s secession and the start of the Civil