Four Causes of the American Civil War

so this is a short video about the causes of the American Civil War there's a lot of reasons why the war breaks out and it's a very controversial topic because each one of those different causes some people say well this one's more of the reason why I posted this and it's very debatable and it still argued very commonly today but I'm going to just kind of explain them briefly there are no real order they just kind of I'm going to go through them as they sort of make sense to me to explain them so the four big causes would be the difference between the economies between the north in the south the question of slavery sectionalism and states rights and I'll go through each one of them very quickly and explain explain to you how they play a part in causing the Americans of war so start with economy the North actually is not too bad for farming but it's not its entire focus the North tends to be broken up a lot more by rocket fields rolling hills smaller farms opposed to large-scale farming and along with their harsh winters economy the north for a long time hasn't really been based on farming some places like Ohio may be but most of your New England states not really instead and this time period they started developing manufacturing or making things using machines along the eastern seaboard up in the northern states they started taking goods like cotton Bynum even from the south and turning them into manufactured goods like textiles so instead of focusing on the growing of crops it was the taking of the crops and making them something more valuable the North because they were doing this didn't really rely on on slave labor or growing things and they said they relied on immigrants coming in to work in their factories so this really helped start to develop towns and cities in the north so north move more toward cities because they had these factories and urban centers the South was much more attached to growing I mean there's a lot of open fields a lot of fertile soil along the river basins and so you found that the South was really really invested in growing crops they were particularly interested in growing crops or making the most money at a time and they could do it large-scale they can have large farms growing one type of good some of the most common crops would be things like cotton rice and the Carolinas tobacco and indigo indigo is used to make a purple dye it was very popular at the time the type of Center for life became the plantation the plantation is not a city it's basically on this large large-scale farm it was the center of the whole to life it was like a small town owned by one person usually you would have slaves work on these fields then they would develop one type of crop as you can see from this picture I mean they have more than one crop exactly but they would probably invest most of their time taking care of cotton or rice and this was the whole function of southern life it wasn't towns or cities it was the plantation was the center of their life so their economy created two different world views about what was important that led to the question of slavery which was a dis discussed slavery had kind of started to die off in the north it was leavin it was kind of on the way out there had been slavery but because farming was never as important to the north it wasn't important in the constraining the South though saw slavery is very very important their whole life styles of plantation lifestyles of growing of crops it was based on this idea that we needed to produce it cheaply and slaves were free workforce the type of slavery you see in the south is called chattel slavery where you own the person totally we usually think of this type of slavery today but it wasn't always common in world history that you would own a person outright a traditionally slavery can be for a short period of time but chattel slavery was you own the person and even their children and slavery in the American South could be very very brutal depends on type of master a person would have but african-americans experienced some really really terrible situation but as I said the South was really really dependent on this type of labor and so whole communities of slaves where it develops from the south and the penalties for trying to escape getting very harsh chattel slavery once again works off the premise that people could own you as property and so for a lot of southerners they receive a slave issue as a really question of humanity but as ownership of a property can someone come and take my my horse no well then how could they take my slave you can see even in Texas all the green counties here are the counties you're going to eventually go to leave the United States we'll talk about that in a second but they're all in counties that were really focused on growing crops the Orange counties were voted were to stay as a part of the Union but all the green counties are right in the middle of cotton growing territory the north because they've gotten away from slavery to develop this culture of abolitionism where people wanted to end slavery and you find people like John Brown the guy on far left William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass all these people were arguing that slavery was really really evil and you would see more and more of that conversation pop up leading up to the Civil War because the North didn't feel like it really needed slavery and it was a moral evil that's all part of another conversation called sexual sexual ISM visible it's not really that difficult to understand I wouldn't say basically the idea that people from the south see themselves as southerners people from the north even self as northerners what's interesting about that is they didn't really always see themselves as Americans if they were to meet each other you know they would talk to those terms I'm from New York I'm a northerner people from the South are weird they believe in slavery they have this kind of culture that's odd and southerners would say this and again thing about northerners of calling me Yankees and they really didn't see themselves as part of one country I mean yeah they knew it but they didn't talk about themselves as one country they refer to themselves for the country they're from this comes from the different economies and geography and it really is easy to see the split between the two they felt like two separate parts of the world instead of the United States and because they sell themselves Steve different it was easy for them to paint each other as monsters or just people who had no understanding of what it was like to be from the other part of the country the last cause is the issue known as states rights we talked about something similar that's earlier with the difference between federalism centralism to the states have more power than the central government or does essential government should have the final call on all decisions this really kind of played out because the south's didn't like a lot of the law being passed by the north and they argued that states should be able to decide if they didn't want to follow laws or not because we were called the United States the states were more important in their mind they're really we're afraid at the North where to pass laws and slavery then they would need to be able to get rid of them not to have to listen to them this kind of popped up once when South Carolina knows by or ignored a law that the North to pass they kind of affected only the southern states it was a tax on things like cotton and because the South was really into you know selling cotton it really affected them and didn't hurt the north and so they said we don't have to listen to these laws it really pops its head up when abraham lincoln became president in 1860 when he was voted in as president nighted states so many southern states saw him as an anti-slavery Pro northern guy that they said we can't have him as our president and we don't want to be part of the US anymore they argued that they should be able to succeed or leave the United States they said each state is its own separate identity and it should be able just to walk away if it wants to and so a lot of students they did and they formed something called the Confederacy or the Confederate States of America so all the states you see in red they said we're not part of the US anymore we don't have to listen to the United States laws the Constitution doesn't really apply to us anymore and so they form their own state so there's about 13 states that did this well the northern states said no you have to listen to the law we all part of one country called the United States we have to be United and they said you could not leave it seems really weird but the southern states are trying to leave and the North said no you can't do it and it became this question of states rights what rights do a state have over the central government and so they kind of leaves us with the causes of the war in summary the economy of the North being manufacturing and economy of the south agricultural said the mat set them at two different sides of what they valued the South reeling it in listen it's my slavery to be successful the North said no that was wrong they saw themselves very different and weird not even part of the same country so when the South tries to leave arguing that they had states rights to ignore law the North said no you are we're different but you don't have the right to leave and so that will set us up for the American Civil War [Music]

Channel: Christopher McDow

Views: 280,684

Keywords:

Id: rC7c3a-WO_g

Length: 10min 46sec (646 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 14 2017