Between the years 1861 and 1865, the United States was traversed by entire armies of soldiers, all American, but at odds with each other. What was it that divided The United Statesgone and caused the Civil war?
The Civil wareither civil warIt was the only war The United States He lived within his own territory. Paradoxically, it was a war without invading enemies, without enemy armies from other nations.
The nation was one, and yet the factions that clashed did not have the same culture or the same traditions. To a certain extent, one can speak of the clash of two nations who lived together, and then lived together, but not without eventually subordinating one to the other.
Causes of the Civil War in the United States
Although in the general ideology the united states civil war its origin was the abolitionist movement, which sought precisely the abolition of slavery in all the states of this country, the truth is that a war rarely has a single factor that motivates it; In this case, doctrinally and in a deeper historical analysis, we are given a series of causes that combined and gave rise to the so-called united states war of secession.
Disparate Economic Models
On the one hand, two disparate economic models were at odds: an economy based on commerce and industry was successfully developing in the northern states of the United States, while the southern states were agricultural.
The agricultural economy of the southerners made slave labor necessary to sustain themselves, while in the north the very progressivism of their economy coupled with strong religious movements, made them have strong anti-slavery ideologies.
Birth of the Confederate States of America
After several years of opposition and ideological struggles for these reasons, each zone was facing the other, which gave rise to the separation of eleven states in the south of the United States. In 1960 Abraham Lincoln is elected to the Presidency of the United States as a recognized abolitionist.
As a result of this, the civil war in the united states it is already a reality, since the south had developed a strong feeling of union raising the flag of slavery as protection of its economic model, eleven states in the south of the United States are separating from it and end up forming a new nation called Confederate States .
This movement is called secessionist since it separates the United States and this war owes its name to it.
Start of the civil war
Finally, in 1961, Abraham Lincoln took office as president, declaring in his speech that secession would not be legally recognized and would be considered null and void, which is why some of the military strongholds in the Confederate States maintained resistance to being taken over by the new separatist government.
Finally, the Confederate States of America decide to attack to gain control of Fort Sumter, beginning the Civil War with this act.
civil war
The civil war it lasted four years, during which there were more than two thousand armed clashes and more than one and a half million combatants died. For its part, the Union army had most of the maritime control, which, added to having most of the resources, gradually tilted the balance in its favor.
Victory and consequences of the Civil War
The civil war culminates in the victory of the Union army in 1864, and thus the reintegration of the Confederate States into the United States of America.
Despite the bloodiness of this war, it was an event that historically served to strengthen the union of this country, marking the beginning of its rise as a powerful and influential nation in the world.
Similarly, slavery was abolished forever in this country, although the problems of racism and segregation of the African-American population persist to this day despite having left behind the united states civil war.
two cultures
The cultural difference between the two factions of the Secession, the North (the Union) against the South (the Confederacy) made each side have its own vision of the facts from an ideological and historical point of view. Different irreconcilable perspectives.
The abolition of slavery appears as one of the main reasons for the war. The abolitionist propaganda that emerged in England It put down strong roots in the northern states as early as 1820.
However, much of the economy depended until the mid-nineteenth century on the cotton industry installed in the south, which used slave labor on its large plantations.
The south grew rich thanks to this type of economic activity, which was losing ground to the advance of the capitalismwhose main workforce was the wage earner.
While this was happening, the north began to develop his industrial Revolution, strongly driven by immigration from Europe. The growing demography of the region favored the internal market for the consumption of basic goods, which the first factories knew how to supply.
With the increase of these factories in the north, the region gradually industrialized, developing a capitalist economic and labor life, with bourgeois investors and salaried workers.
In addition, we must not lose sight of the vast territory that extended to the west, where the railway (another catalyst for industrialization) and the land of the countryside was worked. This sector was an excellent complement for the industrial activities of the north.
The southmeanwhile, remained tied to its almost feudal economy based on slave labor and cotton production, and with it the culture remained linked to the old socioeconomic traditions.
The real reasons for the war
Although the two regions were markedly opposed socially and culturally, and although they maintained different ideologies regarding the slaverythe antagonism between north and south it translated mainly into the conflict between an industrial economy versus an agricultural economy, that of free labor versus forced labor.
The north saw in the slavery a means of fixing workers to the land, to the exclusive benefit of plantation owners. And the North wanted that workforce to be “free” enough so that it could choose to work in industry, in the North, where it favored the new capitalists.
In addition, the slavesUnable to move from where they “belonged”, they increased the population base of the south, and this did not suit the north either. Why? Because the system of political representation of The United States contemplated the representative proportion according to the number of inhabitants of each state.
In this way, the South occupied, thanks to the slaves, 30 seats of the 62 that were in the Senate, 90 of the 233 that existed in the House of Representatives, counted 105 presidential electors of the 295, and supervised all the important commissions. of the Senate.
Even so, the most important point of the rivalry between North and South was the colonization of “free” spaces and territorial expansion.
Each new territory that was colonized in the vast North American continent incorporated the traditions of its colonizers, so it was necessary to establish what type of economic activities were implemented in the new lands, whether those based on the old cotton plantations or the new economies, with leased farms and free labor.
Finally, in this scenario marked by strong contrasts, the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln he won the presidential election of 1860. The South, convinced that it was going to lose the game, took the initiative to declare war on the North in February 1861, in a move again very characteristic of feudal times, when the war as the only safe option for economic expansion.