To What Extent Was The Civil War Inevitable

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Was the Civil war inevitable? In my opinion, I think the civil war was inevitable. The war was the result of bad leadership. The South with its farming and cotton plantation economy and the North with its industrial economy, the North and South held different beliefs of slavery. The South relied on cheap slave labor and was threatened by the North’s push to abolish slavery. Slaves were an essential part of the economy in the South. Slave owners did not want to start paying for labor, which would have hurt the economy there, so any talk about abolishing slaves there got a lot of attention from Southern politicians, many of them owned slaves themselves. Northern politicians passed taxes on goods imported from European countries forcing Southerners to purchase goods from the North, because the south, with little industrialization, almost all …show more content…
The tax on European goods angered many Southerners and added to the competitive feelings between the North and South. The North’s industrial economy attracted more European immigrants because they were able to work in factories for higher pay than if they settled in the South. The immigrants could not compete with the price of cheap slave labor. This led to a boom in population for the North. Five million people migrated from Europe to the United States between 1790 and 1860, many of them to pursue better economic opportunity. An attempt to come to a resolution was the Compromise of 1850. This said that the local people of unrecognized land would decide if slavery should be allowed. This resolution failed. Senator Stephen Douglas passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which stated that Kansas and Nebraska should also have a right to decide if slavery would be allowed or not. This resulted in opposing legislatures in Kansas. Fighting broke out between anti-slave fighters and pro-slave settlers. The president sent troops to stop the fighting, but this event undoubtedly increased the tensions