The Significance of Slavery and Western Expansion

The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in America

Slavery existed in the United States since its founding. However, by the 1840s, abolitionism - the movement to end slavery - was gaining momentum, especially in the Northern states.
More than an economic system, slavery was a social and political institution, shaping the American life in profound ways. Slavery created a rigid caste system based on race and enslaved people were dehumanised and reduced to property.
Southern economies were heavily dependent on plantation agriculture, with cotton as the dominant crop. They were reliant on slave labour and advocated for the preservation of the institution.

Westward Expansion and Slavery

The era of Manifest Destiny in the 1840s spurred American expansion to the West coast. However, the question of whether new territories should be slave states or free states deepened regional tensions.
The Compromise of 1850, an attempt to maintain a balance between slave and free states, temporarily alleviated these tensions. Its key elements included admitting California as a free state and enforcing the controversial Fugitive Slave Act.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 replaced the Missouri Compromise. It allowed the settlers of new territories to decide on the status of slavery thereby renewing national debate and violence.

Slavery and the Crisis of the Union

Slavery played a critical role in the breakdown of the Union. It deepened the political divide between the North and the South, culminating in the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and the Southern states’ decision to secede.
Northern and Southern attitudes towards slavery were shaped by different economic realities and moral perspectives. While Northern abolitionists deemed it morally wrong, pro-slavery advocates in the South often made biblical justifications for slavery and presented it as a ‘positive good’.
Historical debates continue over whether the Civil War was primarily about slavery or states’ rights. However, it is widely accepted that disagreements over slavery and its expansion were at the crux of the sectional crisis.

Remember, a detailed understanding of these events is crucial to grasming the wider context of The Crisis of the American Republic (Part 1: 1840-1861).