What Caused the American Civil War?

Before the Civil War that began in 1861, the United States was a country with a loose social structure. American people throughout the country did not feel strongly connected together. The United States has a vast land and the poor means of transport available at that time did not allow most Americans to come in contact with one another. The result was isolation pf people from most countrymen and there was affiliation with fellow Americans only on a local level. It was natural for a large part of the American population to lack feelings of mutual trust in the early part of the 19th century.

Progress in technology and economy was rapidly changing this scene of disconnectedness among the Americans. Railroads made country-wide travel possible for nearly everyone. The isolation was further broken down by the increasing publication of newspapers and the development of the telegraph system. This shift in the existing state of living-from a divided and sluggish social life to a more connected and speedy one-was creating a sense of belongingness among the people of the United States. But at the same time, it was arousing something that every change incurs i.e. resistance. People given to old ways of living started acting against what they considered as agents of change. Among these, they included the large numbers of Irish and German immigrants living in America, especially when these outlandish people got the right to vote in the 1850s. The Catholic Church was another ant in the pants of people who disliked the changing scene.

As the second law of thermodynamics states, entropy-the measure of disorder of a system- normally tends to increase with time. Put it simply, once things go wrong, they tend to get worse if left untreated. So it happened with the American society. People worried about change in the older lifestyle developed a distrust of others with whom they had not been in contact. People from different parts of the country started to consider distant countrymen as competitors, or opponents. The result was the division of American people in two opposing sections-a division known in history as sectionalism.

Two main sections became known in the country: Northern and Southern. The South differed from the North by factors like climate and plantation etc. However, the most important difference was that slavery of black people persisted in the South while it had been prohibited in the rest of the United States. The masters of these salves in the South defended their position by arguing that blacks were wild and dangerous people and could only be controlled by means of force into slavery. The Northern and other parts of the country were developing an increased feeling of hostility towards the Southerners over this issue of slavery.