The causes of the War were deep-seated and complex. They were Old-World
antagonisms, religious and political, antedating, and yet surviving, the
settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock, New Amsterdam, and New
Orleans;—
The early development in the two great divisions of the country, of
diverse economic conditions—a land of small farms and multiplied
industrial activities confronting one of large plantations and
agricultural supremacy;—
The Protective Tariff, at first enacted to secure for American
manufactures a chance to compete successfully with those of the Old
World, but, in its results, a burdensome system, under which the
agriculturists of the South paid onerous tribute to the manufacturers of
the North;—
Slavery—an institution which specialized more and more the interests of
the South in the great exporting staples of cotton, rice and tobacco,
driving manufactures and mining into the more hospitable regions of the
North;—an institution whose life or death was within the exclusive
power of the separate states where it was legalized, and yet the
manifold incidents of whose existence were the subject of frequent
National legislation, and hence ever recurring occasions of sectional
strife;—an institution which quickened in time among the people of the
non-slaveholding states the conviction that it was a sin, with the
consequent charge that all responsible for its existence were parties to
a crime, thus arousing the bitter resentment of devout men in the
slaveholding states, who, protesting their innocence of wrong,
challenged the right of their Northern brethren to sit in judgment upon
them;—
The Annexation of Texas: A new cause and occasion for sectional
jealousy, precipitating the war with Mexico, and bringing additional
territory into the Union with fresh disputes over the powers of Congress
in regard thereto;—
The Immense Foreign Immigration into the North and West;—thus
developing in those sections the strongest sentiments of Nationalism,
while the South, unaffected by any such forces, adhered to the early
ideals of state pride and state supremacy;—
State Sovereignty versus National Supremacy;—the first, the shield
behind which aggrieved minorities sought to curb arrogant majorities and
safeguard the rights and interests of community life; the second, the
ideal by which the preservation of the Union was to be assured and its
dignity and power at home and abroad vindicated;—
The Missouri Compromise—its enactment and repeal, the controversies as
to the power of Congress to prohibit slaveholders from migrating with
their slaves into the territories, the enactment by Congress of the
Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and the attitude of certain Northern States
in attempting to defeat its execution, the Underground Railroad, the
decision in the Dred Scott case, the armed conflicts in Kansas, the John
Brown Raid and the sympathy evinced at the North for the man and his
venture; and finally:
The asserted right of the Cotton States to withdraw from the Union, and
the declared purpose of the Federal Government to defeat their
aspiration by force of arms.
Add to all the foregoing the vision of mighty armies struggling for
mastery, the terrors and miseries of war—contrasted with the heroism
and devotion which it aroused, and there results a combination of causes
which will continue to make their compelling appeal to the hearts and
imaginations of men.