The Conflict Of The American Civil War Essay

The existence of slavery has long been viewed as the primary cause of the American Civil War. However, slavery is only a portion of the conflict that caused the Civil War. The four developments that contributed to the Civil War were the sectional dispute over the extension of slavery into the western territories, the breakdown of the political party system, the growing cultural differences in the views and lifestyles of southerners and northerners and the intensifying emotional and ideological polarization between the regions over losing their way of life and sacred republican rights at the hands of the other. Slavery was not the only issue culminating in the Civil War but is widely accepted, though superficial.

Territorial expansion in the antebellum years opened the possibility of slavery’s extension to new parts of the country. With Manifest Destiny, the Mexican American War and the Louisiana Purchase, the country questioned whether or not the new territories would enter the union as free states. Before the Mexican-American War, the Missouri Compromise had established a working balance of free and slave states and defined a geographic line across the Louisiana Purchase to determine future decisions. The slavery debate became “heated” because once a state became a free or slave state it received voting rights meaning it further put one party ahead of the other. It also created economic issues because much of the economy was based on slavery due to the South doing more on…