Slavery in the United States

The problem of slavery in the territories created tensions that contributed to the breakup of the Union in 1860-61. The main explanation for the origins of the American Civil War is slavery, especially when it came to Southern anger. The Southern anger was based on the Northern attempts to avoid further slave expansion, which lead to numerous acts, and essentially caused the war against Mexico. The United States was a nation divided into two different regions separated by the Mason-Dixon Line. New England, the Northeast and the Midwest had a rapidly-growing economy based on family farms, industry, mining, commerce and transportation, with a large and rapidly growing urban population and no slavery north of the border-states. Its growth was fed by a high birth rate and large numbers of European immigrants, especially Irish, British and German. The South was dominated by a settled plantation system based on slavery. There was some rapid growth taking place in the Southwest, (i. e. Texas), based on high birth rates and high migration from the Southeast, but it had a much lower immigration rate from Europe. The South also had fewer large cities, and little manufacturing except in border areas (which were very influenced by the Northern region). Slave owners controlled politics and economics, though two-thirds of Southern whites owned no slaves and usually were engaged in subsistence agriculture The economic and social differences between the North and the South were two main f actors that caused tensions that contributed to the breakup of the Union. As stated earlier the South was dominated by a settled plantation system based on slavery. Unlike the North in which slavery was frown upon. The North? s economy was based in small farms, and industrial labor in the urban populated cities. As for the North that socially was shaped by European immigration, the South was very much isolated. The North was progressing as labor united various kinds of cultures achieving a society that sustain in each other, unlike the South who solely depended on the Slaves, even though most farms did not contain slaves the Southern society was moved by the richest plantation owners (which did solely depend on slavery). Some other factors that lead to tension leading to the separation of the Union are; States versus federal rights, the fight between Slave and Non-Slave State Proponents, Growth of the Abolition Movement, and finally the election of Abraham Lincoln.