Causes of the Civil War
...antislavery movement even existed in the South. But most Southerners found that was highly profitable. From a fourth to a third of all Southern whites owned slaves. Those who didn't own them accepted slavery because they thought that the South's economy would collapse without slavery. The Compromise of 1850 only delayed the problem of slavery. It admitted California as a free state, allowed slavery to continue but prohibited the slave trade in Washington D.C., and gave newly acquired territories the right to decide for themselves whether to permit slavery. It also included a strict fugitive slave law that required Northerners to return escaped slaves to their owners. President Taylor and John Calhoun both opposed the compromise, but they died suddenly. The new President Millard Fillmore supported it, and it passed. Northerners resisted the fugitive slave law in several ways. Abolitionists established the Underground Railroad in order to help slaves escape to free states and Canada. Based on the information from escaped slaves, the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe was written. This book added fuel to the controversy. It angered Southerners who said it painted an unfair and untrue picture of plantation life. Northerners accepted it at face value. It was published in 1852, and some 300,000 copies had been sold within a year. Another important issue that added to the tension was the Kansas Nebraska Act passed by Congress in 1854. The act created Kansas and Nebraska and allowed them to decide the issue of slavery by popular sovereignty. In Kansas, proslavery forces rigged the election and adopted a proslavery constitution. Antislavery forces then held their own convention and drafted their own constitution. In May 1856, 700 proslavery thugs entered the free-state town of Lawrence and looted the town. The violence spread to Washington where an antislavery senator, Charles Sumner, was beaten unconsciously by Preston Brooks, a proslavery representative from South Carolina. In the end, Kansas joined as a free state in 1861. Then in 1857, The Supreme Court tried to settle the slavery issue with its Dred Scott Decision. The case involved Dred Scott, a slave who claimed freedom because he had lived for a time in a free state and territory. The court denied his claim and declared no black person could be a citizen. It further ruled that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories. The ruling aroused anger in the North and showed that the conflict over slavery was beyond judicial solutions. Furthermore, in 1859 an extreme abolitionist named John Brown and his followers attempted to start a slave rebellion by seizing the federal arsenal in Harper's Ferry, Virginia. Brown was captured 28 hours later by troops under Colonel Robert E. Lee. Within a few weeks, he was convicted of treason and hanged. Many Southerners saw the raid as evidence of a Northern plot to end slavery by force. Anger over the Kansas-Nebraska Act led to the founding of the...