Antebellum Period: Slavery and Politics

Antebellum Period: Slavery and Politics -  social studies skills studied in 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th grades.

When most of us think about the Civil War, we like to tell ourselves that the whole war was about slavery. This isn’t really true. While slavery was a big part of why the war was fought, it was not the only reason, and not even the main one. Still, it did have a great influence on the period leading up to the war, and the declaration of war itself. How did slavery affect America in the time before the Civil War, and how did it affect the war itself? Slavery was definitely a big part of the politics of the nation at the time.
What you should understand about slavery and America at the time is that it was a major part of the South’s economy, and getting rid of it would really hurt their state of affairs for a long time. This made it a serious political issue when it became clear that the North was against it, and the President as well. But it wasn’t so much an issue of slavery in and of itself as it was the South disagreeing with the Federal government. Continue reading below>>>

The Civil War started because of disagreements over how much power the federal government should have over state governments really. When it became clear that the federal government was going to try and tell the southern states to do things they didn’t agree with, the southern states questioned whether or not they wanted to be a part of the United States, and they thought that state governments should be able to say no to the federal government.
While this wasn’t exactly about slavery, slavery was part of what launched the debate. Because the south believed that slavery was in their best interests, they did not want to obey the federal government when it told them to abolish it. This was one of the biggest issues of debate when it came down to the battle between federal and state power.
That said, slavery made itself a part of major American politics simply by being the driving force behind the disagreement. This means that the war was fought not solely because of slavery, but more because slavery was included in the things the federal government wanted changed while the southern state governments did not.
In this way, we are often mistaken over why the war started and why it was fought. But even though that is the case, it is still true that slavery was a big part of it, even indirectly. While the war itself was a terrible thing, it and the Antebellum period before it were important in establishing how our nation now works and how we believe our government should be. For that, we should be grateful that we figured it out as early as we did, or else states would likely try to secede from the greater whole all the time whenever a law was passed that they didn’t like or didn’t want to listen to.