Prelude to the Civil War

Antietam Cavalry Soldier – Union

The conflict that resulted in the Civil War began over ten years, possibly more, before the war actually began. The United States was experiencing growing pains; a young nation, less than 100 years old, the manifest destiny school of thought that prevailed through much of the U.S. meant that the country was increasing in size – doubling in size, really – yearly, while a schism was growing wider with each state admitted to the Union. The schism was, of course, slavery; as states were added to the Union, the delicate balance that had been stricken between the slave-holding states of the South and the abolitionist states of the North was being upset, and the fragile peace between the two regions began to crumble.

The looming shadow of civil war began to cast its pall over the United States as early as the beginning of the 1800s. The first sign of impending doom was, for many, the Missouri Compromise of 1820. As each state was admitted into the Union, the question of whether or not the state would be a slave -holding state became an important factor in the state’s acceptance into the Union, a balance of slave-holding and non-slave-holding states being important to each side. When Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave-holding state, Maine was admitted as a non-slave-holding state, preserving the balance in Congress, but many in Congress knew that this kind of balance would be difficult to maintain, and thus Congress enacted an agreement that stated that in the future, all states admitted to the Union north of the parallel 36°30′ – excepting Missouri – would be free states, while all those south of the parallel would be slave states.

This uneasy compromise held until 1854, when the Kansas-Nebraska act repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, allowing each state admitted to the Union to have the choice of whether to be a slave state or a free state. While the Kansas-Nebraska act gave the slave-holding decision directly to the people of the state, it also reinforced the belief held throughout the South that the individual state’s rights trumped that of the United States, and began the prelude to the war.

The election of 1860 was the breaking point for the already fractured United States. Abraham Lincoln, a known opponent of slavery, backed by the emerging Republican party, was elected president, and the tensions between the slave-holding states of the South and the free states of the North escalated. Almost as soon as the votes were tallied, a convention was called in South Carolina to break the bonds between South Carolina and the Union. South Carolina seceded, declaring that “that the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states under the name of the ‘United States of America’ is hereby dissolved.” By May 21, 1861, ten more Southern states had joined South Carolina in the Confederate States of America, and war was imminent.