Since there are so many right wing dullards that are trying to re-write our history I thought I would join the debate to try and help clarify the events that lead up to the American Civil War….there are more things that lead to the outbreak of war other than the firing on Ft. Sumter….9 to be exact.

After the American Revolution, a divide between the North and South began to widen. Industrialized northern states gradually passed laws freeing enslaved people, while southern states became increasingly committed to slavery. Many southerners came to view slavery as a linchpin of their agricultural economy, and as a justifiable social and political institution.

Throughout the first half of the 1800s, the nation struggled to manage the clash between these two incompatible viewpoints, working out deals such as the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which sought to balance the number of new free and slave states and drew a line through the nation’s western territories, with freedom to the north and slavery to the south. But in the last decade before war broke out, the conflict gained momentum and intensity. 

“Throughout the 1850s, a series of events increased sectionalism, emboldened southern secessionists, and deepened northern resolve to defend the Union and end slavery,” explains Jason Phillips, the Eberly Family Professor of Civil War Studies at West Virginia University, and author of the 2018 book Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth Century Americans Imagined the Future. “Many of these crises revolved around politics, but economic, social and cultural factors also contributed to the war’s origins.”

Here are nine events from the 1850s to the early 1860s that historians view as critical in the march toward the American Civil War.

https://www.history.com/news/civil-war-causes-issues

This illustrates that there were complex issues that lead to the outbreak of war than the simplistic whitewash that the era gets in history classes these days.

I will do my part to correct the misconceptions….now we all need to do our part and learn our history….all of it….the good, the bad and the ugly.

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

Class dismissed!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”