Causes of the Civil War

This volume of primary documents on the causes of the Civil War presents the history of American political development from the Missouri Compromise to Lincoln’s Inauguration in 1860. More than a century and a half after the crisis came to an end, Americans remain fascinated by it, as they should be. The Civil War is the defining event in American political development. It put to the test whether the “one people,” as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, would remain one.

The documents selected for inclusion in this volume show a variety of viewpoints on the themes that challenged Americans in the decades before the war: the nature of labor and its role as a source of economic growth and expansion; the legitimacy of secession as a tool of federalism; the proper relationship between the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the union, and the rule of law vs. popular sovereignty.

Despite these different perspectives, however, all of the documents in this collection revolve around one central idea that is at the heart of any attempt to understand the coming of the Civil War: slavery, or, perhaps more rightly, the expansion of slavery in the 1850s.  Everyone knew that the future of slavery in the territories would decide the future of the nation. From all points of view and all walks of life, the core argument always came back to slavery as the primary cause of disunity, as these documents illustrate.

From this educational resource, the reader can come to understand and appreciate not only the history of the United States during the Civil War era, but also something about the challenges we have faced and the progress we have made as “one people.” If we are to remain one and dedicated to our defining proposition—that all are created equal—every generation of Americans must understand the time and the reasons why we almost ceased to be.

Key Concepts

• Abolitionism
• Slavery as a positive good
• Free labor
• Popular sovereignty
• Missouri Compromise
• Compromise of 1850
• Dred Scott v. Sandford
• Interposition, nullification and secession
• Creation of the Confederacy
• Abraham Lincoln
• Territorial expansion
• Constitution and union