The United States Civil War and the Issue Of Slavery Analytical Essay by Top Papers

The paper relates that the issue of slavery was a key factor in the events leading up to the Civil War; in fact, a case can be made that it was the issue which instigated the advent of the Civil War (though Lincoln's election surely did not help matters). The paper discusses five key ways in which slavery shaped and animated the lead-up to the civil war: the economic reasons why the south could not bear to part with slavery; the nettlesome issue of states' rights versus federal rights against the backdrop of a looming battle over slavery; the heightened tensions over what to do about the status of new states to the growing American union (should they, in other words, be slave-holding or otherwise?); the sharp moral and philosophical differences between the north and south vis-a-vis slavery (they were, literally, two warring factions enclosed in the same house); and the fears aroused in the south by the ascension to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, a man who seemed to embody the anti-slavery prejudice of the north and who seemed sure to lobby for its ultimate demise. In the end, the paper concludes that slavery was the one thing that drove America towards Civil War - and the one issue of the day that permeated into every facet of human endeavour and interaction during the middle-nineteenth century.