April 12, 1861, the early morning silence is broken by the booming guns from Charleston Harbor. Their target was not some foreign navy; instead they were firing on Fort Sumter the last U.S. held property in the recently seceded state of South Carolina. The Civil War had begun.
Tensions between the northern and southern states had been building up for several years before they finally exploded at Fort Sumter. The causes of all the tension are many, but slavery was at the heart of them all. Northerners viewed slavery as an outdated institution that needed to be done away with. Southerners, however, needed slave labor to work the plantations and keep up with the high demand for “king cotton”.
The first real problem, between the North and South, came when settlers in Missouri applied for statehood as a slave state. Northerners feared that the south was trying to spread slavery into all of the new territories. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 temporarily put an end to the dispute by admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state. The Compromise also ended any other chance of admitting a slave state north of Missouri’s southern border.
After the Mexican-American War, the U.S. gained a new territory. The Wilmot Proviso was introduced forbidding slavery anywhere in the new territory. Once again this angered southerners and talk of secession began louder.
To calm the tide of succession the Compromise of 1850 was reached. This new compromise admitted California as a free state. It gave the other states in the new territory the right to decide for themselves whether or not to have slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act, an act that permitted slave owners to hunt down escaped slaves, was also strengthened.
Manhunts for runaway slaves soon began to anger northerners. Many of whom started strong abolitionist movements. The Underground Railroad, one of such movements, began to smuggle slaves into Canada and into freedom. Uncle Toms Cabin, a novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, showed northerners how terrible slavery really was.
In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed. This act did away with the Missouri Compromise and enabled new states to choose whether or not to allow slavery. Now anti and pro slavery groups began to flock to the new states, each hoping to make those states theirs.
Violent clashes began between the two groups. In May of 1856, a group of pro slavery men burnt the town of Lawrence, Kansas and killed two of its citizens. In retaliation to this an abolitionist named John Brown and some of his men killed five southern settlers at Pottawatomie Creek.
Things in Congress were not much better. Bitter debates and sometimes even violent physical attacks were all too common. The nation was beginning to fall apart because of the extreme differences of opinion relating to slavery.
When Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election of 1860, the situation at hand began to unravel even more. One month after the election, South Carolina seceded from the Union. Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas soon followed South Carolinas lead. Soon after the secession, the Confederate States of America was established and in April the newly formed nation fired on Fort Sumter. To be continued...
Beginnings of the war...
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