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Summary Of The American Civil War

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The American Civil War Introduction War and Industrialization This book is a short comparative history. It is a survey of three wars, the Crimean war (1854-6), the American Civil War (1861-5) and the German Wars of Unification (1864,1866,1870-71). As all levels of human intercourse are mainly about power, the influence of politics on war will be an important theme in the pages that follow. Sir Herbert Butterfield, in his book Man on His Past (1955), quotes Schlozer, a German eighteenth-century historian, who was of the opinion that ‘History without politics is mere monkish chronicles’. These three wars (or groups of wars ) were fought more than 4,000 miles apart ; yet the first and third were brought about by changes in the …show more content…

Without the issue of slavery there would have been no war. It threw into doubt the very meaning of American freedom. To Southerners the greatest freedom they could enjoy was taking their property- their slaves – into every corner of the country, even where slavery had previously been outlawed. The Southern emphasis on ‘states’ rights’ was essentially a coded phase for the defence of slavery – the South’s ‘peculiar institution’. The South did not go to war in defence of the right of its state governments to charter banks. During the 1840s a pro-slavery ideology grew up arguing that, by comparison with the brutality of industrial urban civilization, paternal rural slavery was a positive good. After the Compromise of 1850, slavery had made some advances and Southerners demanded not only that they should have the right to take their slaves into the domain of territory seized from Mexico after the war of 1846-8, but that Kansas should enter the Union as a slave state. The desultory violence that accompanied these demands provoked the growth of the anti-slavery Republican Party, which sought to restrict slavery to its existing limits. The depression of 1857, which hit the more industrial North harder, inspired the South with an exaggerated idea of the economic strength of ‘King Cotton’ grown by its system of slave-based plantations. When the Crimean War came to an end in 1857 the loss of new European markets for Northern cereals, previously supplied by Russia, added to the economic depression and darkened and atmosphere already marred by a sense of domestic

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