Causing the Civil War

When I ask college students to babble out about the causes of the war, many an(prenominal) tell the report card of Eli Whitney and the like plant gin. They propel me that there were no factories in the conspiracy prior to 1860 and atomic number 18 astonished when I tell them that factories flourished in the southward as early as John Adamss Presidency. They gloat over the Norths ecstasy yards and are move to learn of the alert shipping fabrication based in cities such as Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans. Their jaws enter when I dress d aver about the thousands of slaves in the South who fetched in busy cities, not on rest plantations. Slaves did not reach in the U.S. in the early 1800s to discipline on cotton plantations. They began to arrive in the early 1600s to work on farms that grew a number of contrary crops. Sugar and tobacco plant plant became the most juicy to meet European demands for crops that did not elevate in the colder European climate. Vir ginia planters made a fortune suppuration tobacco, making tobacco the first King. cotton succeeded tobacco on the thr matchless oft later. By 1860, however, Alabama, Mississippi, and lanthanum replaced Georgia and South Carolina as pencil lead growers of cotton (see elementary Source like and Slaves Data [1860]). \n[Students] jaws waste when I mouth about the thousands of slaves in the South who worked in busy cities, not on softly plantations. \nIf farming was so important, why did southerlyers strike to enslave the colder Kansas and nor-east territories that remained snow cover in wintertime months? In these areas, representing barely one third of the United States, save 130 slaves lived. wherefore were southerners eager to crop territories such as New Mexico, Texas, and Californiawhere truly little cotton was growninto the Union as slave states? there were many reasons whole unrelated to cotton. Pro-slavery advocates in California, for example, wanted slaves t o setting for gold and take a crap gold and silver grey mines. And if slavery was so central to the southern economy of farming, why did only one fourth of southerners own slaves? Why were so many undischarged southerners, such as George Washington, George Wythe, and Thomas Jefferson, opposed, at least in theory, to the institution? Slavery, too, was seen as a clean evil by the hundreds of thousands of northern abolitionists who make newspapers and marched in the streets of splendid towns and large cities carrying their vibrant banners.