Between 1850 and 1861, every attempt to settle the expansion of slavery made the sectional conflict more severe. The Fugitive Slave Act, Bleeding Kansas, the Dred Scott decision, John Brown’s raid and Abraham Lincoln’s election progressively destroyed trust between North and South. Secession was not inevitable in 1850, but by early 1861 political compromise had collapsed.
The American Civil War did not begin suddenly with the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861. It emerged from a decade of political crises in which the United States repeatedly failed to resolve the status of slavery in its expanding territories.
Territorial growth after the Mexican-American War made the conflict especially urgent. The United States had acquired California and a vast western region, but Congress had not decided whether slavery would be permitted there.
Southern slaveholders argued that they had a constitutional right to carry enslaved people into federal territories. Many Northerners opposed the expansion of slavery, although they did not all support racial equality or immediate abolition.
The crisis therefore concerned more than a moral disagreement. It involved political representation, economic power, federal authority and the future balance between free and slave states.
The structural differences between the sections are examined in North and South Before the American Civil War.
