By the 1850s, the issue of slavery had created deep divisions between the North and South of the United States. (a) Describe the main differences between th...

(a) The main differences between the North and South over slavery by 1850 [4 marks]

By 1850, the Northern and Southern states had developed fundamentally different positions on slavery. The Northern states had largely abolished slavery by the early nineteenth century, and their economy was increasingly based on industry, commerce and free wage labour. A growing abolitionist movement, led by figures such as William Lloyd Garrison (publisher of The Liberator from 1831) and Frederick Douglass (a former enslaved person who became a powerful orator and writer), demanded the complete end of slavery on moral grounds.

The Southern states' economy depended heavily on slavery, particularly for the production of cotton, which had become enormously profitable after the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. By 1850, approximately four million enslaved people laboured on Southern plantations. Southern politicians and intellectuals defended slavery as essential to their economic system, as a positive good for both races, and as a constitutional right protected by the principle of states' rights. They argued that the federal government had no authority to interfere with slavery in states where it already existed.

(b) Why the Compromise of 1850 failed to resolve the slavery question [6 marks]

The Compromise of 1850, brokered by Henry Clay and championed by Stephen Douglas, attempted to settle the disputes arising from the territory acquired in the Mexican-American War (1846-48). It admitted California as a free state, organised the Utah and New Mexico territories with popular sovereignty (allowing settlers to decide the slavery question), and abolished the slave trade (but not slavery) in Washington, D.C.

However, the Compromise included the controversial Fugitive Slave Act, which required Northern states to return escaped enslaved people to their owners and imposed penalties on anyone who helped them flee. This law outraged abolitionists and created bitter resentment in the North, bringing the reality of slavery into Northern states that had abolished it. Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), partly inspired by the Fugitive Slave Act, further inflamed anti-slavery sentiment.

The fundamental question of whether slavery would be permitted in new territories remained unresolved. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which introduced popular sovereignty into territories where slavery had been banned by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, effectively overturned the earlier settlement and reignited the conflict. "Bleeding Kansas" (1856), where pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers fought a violent struggle, showed that political compromise was breaking down. The Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision of 1857, which ruled that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories and that African Americans were not citizens, further inflamed tensions and made compromise increasingly impossible.

(c) How far was slavery the main cause of the American Civil War? [10 marks]

Slavery was the central cause of the Civil War. Every major political crisis of the 1850s was about slavery: the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Bleeding Kansas, the Dred Scott decision, and John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. The Republican Party was founded in 1854 specifically to oppose the expansion of slavery into the western territories. Abraham Lincoln's election as president in November 1860 on a platform of preventing slavery's expansion was the immediate trigger for secession; South Carolina seceded in December 1860, and six more states followed before Lincoln took office. The Southern states explicitly cited the threat to slavery in their declarations of secession: Mississippi's declaration stated that "our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery."

The economic differences between North and South were themselves rooted in the slave labour system. The South's agricultural economy depended on enslaved labour, while the North's industrial economy was based on free labour. Tariff disputes between the industrial North (which wanted protective tariffs) and the agricultural South (which wanted free trade) reflected this fundamental economic divergence.

Some historians and contemporaries emphasised other factors. States' rights and the question of whether the federal government could override state laws was a constitutional issue that predated the slavery crisis. Cultural differences between the two regions had been growing for decades. Some Southern leaders were motivated by the fear that the growing population of the North would permanently marginalise Southern political interests in Congress.

However, as the historian James McPherson and others have argued, the states' rights argument was primarily used to defend the institution of slavery. When Southern states had the political power to do so (as with the Fugitive Slave Act), they were perfectly willing to use federal authority to enforce slaveholders' rights. The economic, cultural and constitutional differences between North and South all flowed from the fundamental disagreement over slavery.

On balance, slavery was overwhelmingly the main cause of the Civil War. Other factors, including states' rights, economic differences and cultural divergence, were either consequences of or closely connected to the fundamental disagreement over the future of slavery in the United States.