What Really Caused the Civil War?

Kaveena Bullock

Professor Young

AFAM: The New Jim Crow

9 February 2017

What Caused the Civil War?

Prior to this lesson about the Civil War, in high school I remember learning about the Civil War as something smaller in a larger section of American history. I was always taught that the Civil War was a battle between the North and the South, which had the Confederate states. The war was about slavery and how the North wanted to end slavery, which is what they were fighting about. There was a man named General Robert E. Lee that led the Confederate side. He was known in American history as a great General that led our troops. I was also taught that blacks fought in the slave but white men did not want them in the war. Once the war happened, the North won and then slavery was over. I more so remember the movie that was made with Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman called Glory. The teacher would rather play the movie than teach the lesson. We watched the movie at the end of our unit about the Civil War but never taught the specific events that led to the war.

One factor that I do remember about the Civil War was tariffs and how significant they were to the Southern states. The first factor that I learned more about in this lesson was about the Tenth Amendment, which was to state that laws differed depending on the state. I did not know that this caused problems when it came to Congress and representations of each state. The conclusion to this so each state could have a fair say in how many representatives they had was The Great Compromise. This meant that each state had the same amount of representatives in the Senate and their population was based on the representation in the House of Representatives. Because of this, the South wanted more representation than the North. This led to the 3/5 compromise.

The 3/5 compromise meant that every slave counted as 3/5 of a person, not even a full human being. This caused a stir in the North because even though the Tenth Amendment was part of the Bill of Rights, this compromise contradicted what the Declaration of Independence stated. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Declaration of Independence). In school I was not taught that the South considered slaves 3/5 of a person to count them for more representations. I was also not taught how contradicting laws and declarations are in this country when it came to the Civil War. There was the illusion that this war “fixed” slavery problems until Jim Crow laws and the 1960s era came around. This information taught me that this war was more than just North versus South and that this helped ended slavery.