🗽 US History · Expansion and Division
Causes of the Civil War flashcards
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All 17 flashcards at a glance
Card 1
This lesson names three “other factors” alongside the central cause, slavery. Which three?
Tariffs, sectional politics (the balance of power between North and South in Congress) and competing views of federal power. The textbook consensus still names slavery as the central cause.
Card 2
What kind of economy did the South have before the war?
A plantation economy. Large farms grew cotton, tobacco, rice and sugar and depended on the forced labor of enslaved people.
Card 3
What kind of economy did the North have before the war?
Growing industry, cities, railroads and immigration, with mostly free labor: wage workers and families on their own farms.
Card 4
Why did the balance of free and slave states matter?
Every state has two senators, so the balance decided which side had the power to pass or block laws about slavery in the Senate.
Card 5
How did California enter the Union under the Compromise of 1850?
As a free state.
Card 6
What did the Fugitive Slave Act require of ordinary citizens?
To help return people who had escaped slavery when asked. People who refused or interfered could be punished.
Card 7
What is popular sovereignty?
The idea that the settlers of a territory would vote on whether to allow slavery there.
Card 8
What was “Bleeding Kansas”?
The violence in the Kansas Territory in the 1850s between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers, who were fighting over whether Kansas would allow slavery.
Card 9
Who wrote the main opinion in the Dred Scott decision?
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney.
Card 10
What did John Brown hope to achieve at Harpers Ferry?
To seize weapons from the federal arsenal and start an armed uprising of enslaved people. The raid failed, and he was convicted and hanged.
Card 11
Which party, formed in the 1850s, opposed the spread of slavery into the territories?
The Republican Party.
Card 12
Who became the president of the Confederate States of America?
Jefferson Davis, a former U.S. senator from Mississippi.
Card 13
What did the Crittenden Compromise propose, and what happened to it?
It proposed extending the 36°30′ line to the Pacific, with slavery protected south of it. Lincoln and the Republicans rejected it because it would have let slavery spread, and it failed.
Card 14
Who was William Lloyd Garrison?
A white abolitionist in Boston who published the newspaper The Liberator and called for an immediate end to slavery.
Card 15
Why did many Southern leaders see Lincoln's election as a threat?
His party was committed to stopping slavery's spread. Southern leaders feared this would weaken slavery's future and Southern power in Congress, even though Lincoln said he would not interfere with slavery where it existed.
Card 16
Which four slave states stayed in the Union?
Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, called the border states.
Card 17
How should you describe “states' rights” in the secession crisis?
As an argument made at the time that was tied closely to the right to hold enslaved people. It was not a separate cause of equal weight.