The American Civil War is well known, primarily because it started because of the institution of slavery. All people in the North and South were influenced by the brutal and costly war that lasted four chaotic years (“The North and the South”). The bloody conflict of the industrial North against the agrarian South claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. On the other hand, it is safe to say that the violent end of the Civil War had been prepared for decades (“The North and the South”). Distinct differences in relation to slavery became, although not the main, but the nominal cause of the war. These were the attitude toward anti-slavery laws, economic methods, religious customs, education, and cultural differences between the two sides (“The North and the South”). Moreover, it was influenced by the political divisions that have shown the North and South at odds over the issue of slavery for more than a century. In the early nineteenth century, North and South gradually diverged, eventually forming two separate and distinctly different parts of the United States.
Northern children, more often than the southern children, had the privilege to attend school, keeping with the older traditions of universal education of the Puritans of the North. The religion of the Puritans of the North differed from that of the former Anglican Cavaliers of the South (“The North and the South”). Slavery was denounced as a moral atrocity by the North, which politically associated with abolitionists and politicians to end it.
These facts come from the different cultural pasts of the North and the South. Puritans and high church aristocrats were separate currents of Anglicanism in pre-colonial England (Benge and Pickowicz 52). Puritans were subject to Calvinistic and Lutheran mores. For example, the Puritans banned foreplay, music, and public gatherings during holidays (Benge and Pickowicz 102). Simultaneously, the Puritans’ piety required them to rely on themselves rather than enslaved people and to be read. An illiterate person will be unable to read the Bible or put down his views on paper (Benge and Pickowicz 37). As a result, the North was, for the most part, considerably less oriented toward a slave economy in the end. The erstwhile Puritan Northern states favored wage labor over slavery, and this, combined with universal education, propelled them to the forefront of American industrialization.
In the South, the heirs of former decadent aristocrats bought land and bought enslaved people, creating plantations that became the basis of their economy. Aristocratic kinship, social stratification, and dislike of universal education for the lowborn were the hallmarks of this society (Collins 54). These factors led to the South and the North developing in completely different directions. While the Puritans were developing the ideas of education and hard work, the southern aristocrats were getting a surplus from primitive agrarian slavery (Collins 81). As a result, these societies have come to a natural boundary economically, ideologically, and culturally. The conflict between these two completely different and conflicting cultures has always existed, even before the initial colonization of North America. Cavaliers from the higher Anglican Church, and Puritans from the lower, fought back in Britain. In the New World, the conflicts between the two religious communities only intensified and began to develop separately.
Based on the previous statements, it can be judged that the war was inevitable from the very beginning, and the real miracle of history is that it occurred only in the 19th century. One may claim that in 1860-1861, the divisions between the North and the South could not be resolved. Because the North and South had previously attempted to achieve an agreement on the issue of slavery and state rights, this was the case. The Missouri Compromise (1820) (“Missouri Compromise (1820)”), the 1850 Compromise (“Compromise of 1850 (1850)”), and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act (“Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854)”) were all examples of the North and South attempting to resolve their differences. However, all three of these legislative accords failed, demonstrating that there was no way to avert civil war.
Works Cited
Benge, Dustin, and Nate Pickowicz. The American Puritans. Adfo Books, 2020.
Collins, Bruce. White Society in the Antebellum South (Studies in Modern History). 1st ed., Addison-Wesley Longman Ltd, 1985.
“Compromise of 1850 (1850).” National Archives, 2022.
“Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854).” National Archives, 2022.
“Missouri Compromise (1820).” National Archives, 2022.
“The North and the South.” American Battlefield Trust, 2021.