Causes of the American Civil War facts for kids

Kids Encyclopedia Facts
(Redirected from Origins of the American Civil War)



US Secession map 1861
Status of the states, 1861

Slavery was a major cause of disunion. Slavery was illegal in much of the North, having been outlawed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It was also fading in the border states and in Southern cities, but it was expanding in the highly profitable cotton districts of the rural South and Southwest. The strategy of the anti-slavery North was to stop the expansion and thus put slavery on a path to gradual extinction. The slave-holding South denounced this strategy as infringing upon their Constitutional rights. Southern whites believed that the emancipation of slaves would destroy the South's economy, due to the large amount of capital invested in slaves and fears of integrating the ex-slave black population.



Sectionalism refers to the different economies, social structure, customs and political values of the North and South. It increased steadily between 1800 and 1860 as the North, which phased slavery out of existence, industrialized, urbanized, and built prosperous farms, while the deep South concentrated on plantation agriculture based on slave labor, together with subsistence farming for poor freedmen.

States' rights

The South argued that each state had the right to secede - leave the Union - at any time, that the Constitution was a "compact" or agreement among the states. Northerners (including President Buchanan) rejected that notion as opposed to the will of the Founding Fathers who said they were setting up a perpetual union.

Territorial crisis

See also: Bleeding Kansas


Both the South and the North came to the same conclusion: "The power to decide the question of slavery for the territories was the power to determine the future of slavery itself."

Lincoln's election


Causes of the American Civil War Facts for Kids. Kiddle Encyclopedia.