Why Slavery had such a big impact on the casue of the Civil War

Essay by NormaJean19 December 2003

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The Civil War was fought only because the North was opposed to slavery and the South was in favor of it. I believe that the Civil War was fought only because of slavery. The North and South had disagreements on almost everything, but the biggest thing they disagreed on was slavery. The American Revolution had been fought to validate the idea that all men were created equal, yet slavery was legal in all of the thirteen colonies throughout the revolutionary period. Although it was largely gone from the northern states by 1787, it was still enshrined in the new Constitution of the United States, not only at the request of the Southern ones, but also with the approval of many of the Northern delegates who saw that there was still much money to be made in the slave trade by the Yankee shipping industry.

At the Constitutional Convention there were arguments over slavery.

Representatives of the Northern states claimed that if the Southern slaves were mere property, then they should not be counted toward voting representation in Congress. Southerners, placed in the difficult position of trying to argue, at least in this case, that the slaves were human beings, eventually came to accept the three-fifths compromise, by which five slaves counted as three free men toward that representation. By the end of the convention the institution of slavery itself, though never specifically mentioned, was well protected within the body of the Constitution.

There were political factors that contributed to the Civil War and slavery. The Missouri Compromise was to separate slavery from freedom. An imaginary line was drawn at 36 degrees 30 minutes north latitude, and any portions of the Louisiana Territory lying north of the compromise line would be free; however, the act provided that fugitive slaves "escaping into...