Student Question
What were the short and long-term causes of U.S. secession?
Quick answer:
The short-term cause of U.S. secession was Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860, which spurred Southern fears about the abolition of slavery. Long-term causes included the growing divide over slavery, cultural differences, and regional economic interests. The North's industrialization and urbanization contrasted with the South's agricultural reliance on slavery, leading to tensions. Additionally, differing views on government power, with the North favoring federal authority and the South advocating for state sovereignty, compounded these conflicts.
The long term cause of secession was the growing consensus against slavery. The short term cause was the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln as U.S. president.
While many people assumed slavery would die on the vine, Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin, which made it easier to separate cotton from its seeds, fueled demand for cotton. Cotton plantings grew larger every decade in the first half of the nineteenth century; however, growing and harvesting cotton profitably depended on slave labor. Rather than slavery dying, the institution grew.
The growth of slavery collided with a growing humanitarian sentiment opposing slavery as a moral wrong. Southern planters feared the abolition of slavery as the U.S. expanded westward while Northerners, especially after the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin , increasingly insisted that slavery must end immediately. Political attempts at compromise all seemed to cause more problems. Each side became...
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hardened into its position, with Southerners moving from asserting slavery as a necessary evil to arguing it was a positive good for the slaves. But even as they insisted on the benefits of slavery, Southern leaders began to prepare for secession as possibly the only way to safeguard the institution.
Lincoln's election as president became the short-term catalyst for the Southern planters to orchestrate a rebellion. They decide to use military force to secede from the union, starting the Civil War.
What were the long-term causes of secession?
When we think about the long-term causes of secession at the time of the Civil War, we must point to deep-seated cultural differences between the North and the South as well as vastly different views in the two regions about the nature and extent of government. Let's look at these in more detail.
By the mid-1800s, the North and the South were already almost like two different countries. The North was becoming more and more industrialized and urbanized each year. People still in rural areas usually lived in villages or on small farms. The South, on the other hand, was largely agricultural and did not have the developed industry of the North. Life was much slower in the South, and values were quite different. Slavery still existed in the South as well, largely due to the plantation economy. This drastically different way of life created tensions and conflicts that stood behind secession, especially when the federal government tended to favor the financial interests of the North with tariffs that were good for Northern industry but bad for Southern agriculture.
We can also examine the ideas about government embraced by many people in the North and the South. Many in the North tended to support a more centralized government in which the federal government exercised significant power. People in the South, however, often focused on the sovereignty of individual states, claiming that the states should decide most issues for themselves without the supervision or interference of the federal government, the powers of which were strictly limited by the Constitution.
The question of slavery brought these divergent ideas into stark relief. The federal government, backed by many people in the North, wanted to control the expansion of slavery in the territories, while Southerners claimed that the people in the territories (which were to become states) should decide the question of slavery for themselves.