Slavery And The American Civil War - 3525 Words

One of the long-term causes (1800s-1850s) of the American Civil War was Manifest Destiny and the United States acquiring of new territory. As of 1846 the United States had determined the status of slavery in all parts of the U.S. through either state law or the Louisiana Purchase (pg. 378). When the U.S. went to Mexico and gained all new territory, it reopened the controversy over the expansion of slavery. Solutions arose, like the Wilmot Proviso and Free Soil Appeal, which both prohibited slavery in the new territories acquired from Mexico, but both solutions failed. In 1850, California requested to be admitted to the Union as a free state and in doing so the slave trade, but not slavery, would be abolished in the nation’s capital; this†¦show more content†¦381). This law caused southerners to put the importance of the security of slavery before the state’s rights controversy. The law widened sectional divisions among the states and their current views of slav ery. Some of the short-term causes (1850s-1861) of the American Civil War were: Bleeding Kansas, the Dred Scott Decision of 1857, and the Secession Movement of 1860. Bleeding Kansas was a series of violent and sporadic civil wars that broke out in the state between anti-slavery mobs and proslavery mobs after the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. This proved that President Douglas’s policy of leaving the decision of slavery up to the local population was a bad idea. The Dred Scott Decision of 1857 was the case of a slave named Dred Scott who had accompanied his owner to Illinois, where slavery had been prohibited by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and then to Wisconsin, where it was prohibited by the Missouri Compromise (pg. 389). When Dred Scott returned to his home in Missouri he sued for his freedom because he claimed that residence on free soil ad made him free (pg. 389). Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared that only white people could be citizens in the United States, and the rul ing stated that under the Constitution, Congress possessed no power to bar slavery in a territory