The Killer Angels and Slavery

When a researcher studies the causes of most wars, the causes for nearly any war are usually innumerable. However, there are a select few wars that even in the presence of several different motives, one underlying object or ideal seems to always be the root of the problem. One prime example of this idea is the American Civil War wherein almost every individual soldier had a different reason for being on the battlefront. One nation whose people had grown into a melting pot had slowly been torn down the center for several decades before the inevitable war came. Slavery seemed to affect everything in the United States during the time leading up to, during, and even after the Civil War. Thus, the issue was unavoidable, and whatsoever conflict arose from this issue was not only important to those involved, but the entire country. With the issue of slavery at the national level that it rose to be at, there was absolutely no way the war and the prevailing awkwardness that followed the war could have been avoided. The seeds for the Civil War were sown roughly around the turn of the 19th century, over fifty years before war was declared. This is when the northern states began slowly abolishing slavery one by one, thus awakening the South 's fears of an eventual demand for the freedom of slaves in every state. The southern fear of abolishment was well founded due the sheer importance of slavery to the economy in those southern states. Since the South was more rural than the North, a trend continued to the present time, plantations flourished and the need for manual labor was omnipresent. This became even more prevalent with Eli Whitney 's relatively recent invention of the cotton gin. According to many, slaves were the southern economy. Thus, the majority of the southerners surmised that if slaves were taken away, the southern economy would be taken away alongside them. This caused a demand for a sort of fallback plan so that the south could keep their remaining slaves