13 The American Civil War-推荐下载

13, The American Civil War
Q: What were the causes of the American Civil War? What were the process and effect of the Civil War?
A：
•The causes of the Civil War
•The process of the Civil War
•The significance of the Civil War
1.Slavery
•Slavery in the United States first began in Virginia in 1619. By the end of the American Revolution, most northern states had abandoned the institution while it continued to grow and flourish in the plantation economy of the South.
•In the years prior to the Civil War almost all sectional conflicts revolved around the slave issue. This began with the debates over the three-fifths clause at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and continued with the Compromise of 1820, the Nullification Crisis, the anti-slavery Gag Rule, and the Compromise of 1850.
2. States’ rights
•As the South recognized that control of the government was slipping away, it turned to a states' rights argument to protect slavery.•Southerners claimed that the federal government was prohibited from impinging upon the right of slaveholders take their "property" into a new
territory and also not permitted to interfere with slavery in those states where it already existed.
3. Sectionalism and cotton trade
•Sectionalism refers to the different economies, social structure, customs and political values of the North and South. It increased steadily between 1800 and 1860 as the North, which phased slavery out of existence, industrialized, urbanized and built prosperous farms, while the deep South concentrated on plantation agriculture based on slave labor, together with subsistence farming for the poor whites. Confederates counted on King Cotton for economic leverage on Europe.
Territorial crisis
Between 1803 and 1854, the United States achieved a vast expansion of territory through purchase, negotiation, and conquest. Of the states carved out of these territories by 1845, all had entered the union as slave states: Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida and Texas, as well as the southern portions of Alabama and Mississippi. These were balanced by new free states created within the U.S.' original boundary east of the Mississippi River, and the free state of Iowa in 1846. With the conquest of northern Mexico, including California in 1848, slaveholding interests looked forward to the institution flourishing in much of these lands as well. Southerners also anticipated garnering slaves and slave states in Cuba and Central America. Northern free soil interests vigorously sought to curtail
any further expansion of slave soil. It was these territorial disputes that the proslavery and antislavery forces collided over.
National elections
Beginning in the American Revolution and accelerating after the War of 1812, the people of the United States grew in their sense of country as an important example to the world of a national republic of political liberty and personal rights. In the world of 19th century self-made Americans, growing in prosperity, population and expanding westward, "freedom" could mean personal liberty or property rights. The unresolved difference would cause failure—first in their political institutions, then in their civil life together.
The process of the War
1861: Hostilities began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces fired upon Fort Sumter, a key fort held by Union troops in South Carolina. Lincoln called for every state to provide troops to retake the fort; consequently, four more slave states joined the Confederacy, bringing their total to eleven. The first bloodshed of the Civil War occurred in Maryland during the Baltimore riot of 1861 on April 19. Lincoln soon controlled the border states, after arresting state legislators and suspending habeas corpus,[7] ignoring the ruling of the Supreme Court's Chief Justice that such suspension was unconstitutional, and established a
naval blockade that crippled the southern economy. The Eastern Theater was inconclusive in 1861–62.
1862-1863: The autumn 1862 Confederate campaign into Maryland (a Union state) ended with Confederate retreat at the Battle of Antietam, dissuading British intervention.[8] Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which made ending slavery a war goal.[9] To the west, by summer 1862 the Union destroyed the Confederate river navy, then much of their western armies, and the 1863 Union siege of Vicksburg split the Confederacy in two at the Mississippi River.In 1863, Robert E. Lee's Confederate incursion north ended at the Battle of Gettysburg.
1864-1865: Western successes led to Ulysses S. Grant's command of all Union armies in 1864. In the Western Theater, William T. Sherman drove east to capture Atlanta and marched to the sea, destroying Confederate infrastructure along the way. The Union marshaled the resources and manpower to attack the Confederacy from all directions, leading to the protracted Siege of Petersburg. The besieged Confederate army eventually abandoned Richmond, seeking to regroup at Appomattox Court House, though there they found themselves surrounded by union forces. This led to Lee's surrender to Grant on April 9, 1865.
The victory: All Confederate generals surrendered by that summer. While the military war had ended, and there was no insurgency, the
political reintegration of the nation took another 12 years, known as the Reconstruction Era. The war finally ended when a consensus was reached that Confederate nationalism and black slavery were both dead.
The significance of the Civil War
Effect
•Advantages
•1. slavery was abolished and all black southern slaves were freed •Following the Union victory in 1865, three amendments to the U.S. Constitution brought about the prohibition of slavery, gave U.S. citizenship to the nearly four million African Americans who had been slaves, and promised them voting rights.
•2. increased the federal power
•The war and its resolution led to a substantial increase in federal power aimed at reintegrating and rebuilding the Southern states while ensuring the rights of the newly freed slaves.
•3.promoted economic development
•It enhanced economic development. It is the second democratic bourgeois revolution.
•Disadvantages
•1.caused great costs
•The war produced about 1,030,000 casualties (3% of the population), including about 620,000 soldier deaths—two-thirds by disease, and
50,000 civilians. Birmingham University historian J. David Hacker believes the number of soldier deaths was approximately 750,000, 20% higher than traditionally estimated, and possibly as high as 850,000. The war accounted for roughly as many American deaths as all American deaths in other U.S. wars combined.
•2.The black people still cannot enjoy the equal freedom
•But following the Reconstruction, throughout the South Jim Crow laws soon effectively disenfranchised most blacks and some poor whites. Over the subsequent decades, in both the North and the South blacks and some whites faced systemic discrimination, including racial segregation and occasional vigilante violence, sparking national movements against these abuses.。