![]() In the wake of the Mexican War, tensions developed between the North and South over whether the western land gained by the U.S. Here are nine events from the 1850s to the early 1860s that historians view as critical in the march toward the American Civil War. “Many of these crises revolved around politics, but economic, social and cultural factors also contributed to the war’s origins.” “Throughout the 1850s, a series of events increased sectionalism, emboldened southern secessionists, and deepened northern resolve to defend the Union and end slavery,” explains Jason Phillips, the Eberly Family Professor of Civil War Studies at West Virginia University, and author of the 2018 book Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth Century Americans Imagined the Future. But in the last decade before war broke out, the conflict gained momentum and intensity. Throughout the first half of the 1800s, the nation struggled to manage the clash between these two incompatible viewpoints, working out deals such as the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which sought to balance the number of new free and slave states and drew a line through the nation’s western territories, with freedom to the north and slavery to the south. Many southerners came to view slavery as a linchpin of their agricultural economy, and as a justifiable social and political institution. Industrialized northern states gradually passed laws freeing enslaved people, while southern states became increasingly committed to slavery. After the American Revolution, a divide between the North and South began to widen.
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