What was the root cause of the Civil War?

The question that needs to be answered for the worksheet is: What was the root cause of the Civil War?

1. Read/Review the eLearn sources from the Module that relate to the question then start on the first section of the Source Evaluation Worksheet. You need to read all the eLearn sources associated with your question, but you only need to analyze two on the worksheet. 2. Perform your own research and find at least TWO sources that will be useful in answering the question. Then complete the second section of the Source Evaluation Worksheet to understand the substance and validity of the sources your found.For primary sources, teachinghistory.org has a great list of digitized primary source collections across the US. The Library of Congress collections are also excellent. You may not use crowd-edited websites (Wikipedia, Answers.com, etc.)The sources you evaluate (and ultimately use in your essay) need to be of good quality, relevant to your topic, and contribute new ideas and information that you would not find in the Elearn source or textbook. The relevance, depth, and quality of your sources are part of your grade. You are required to evaluate (and use in your essay) at least one scholarly journal or book Question clarification: I know the question suggests a single answer, but that is not a requirement. There can be more than one cause of the Civil War. The idea of phrasing it as a “root cause” is to get you to think critically about cause and effect- think about the origins and the deeper issues that led to war. Using your ASPIRE topics can be useful here (EX: there were political, social, and economic causes that led to the Civil War).

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Selections from “The Republican Critique of the South”
Identify these elements in this reading:
The degradation of labor in slave society because of it’s association with slaves
The slaves lack of incentive because effort does not create opportunity for them
The concentration of wealth in the South
The racism of northern whites and the fundamentally racist reason for not wanting slavery in the West
Selections from Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men
by Eric Foner
“ THE REPUBLICAN CRITIQUE OF THE SOUTH”
If the free labor outlook gave Republicans a model of the good society, it also provided them a yardstick for judging other social systems and by this standard, slave society was hound woefully wanting… The southern class structure [was] an irrevocably fixed hierarchy and southern society was dominated by an aristocracy of slaveholders.
Some Republicans believed, to be sure, that the Negro was by nature wasteful and lazy… but usually Republicans argued that it was not the Negro himself who was to blame for the South’s backwardness; it was rather that the institution of slavery deprived him of both the education and the incentives which made labor of northern free-men so productive.
…Slaves lacked the incentive which inspired few laborers-the hope of improving their social condition and that of their families. “Enslave a man” Horace Greeley explained, “and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering ones condition is the mainspring of effort.”
Of all the evils of slavery, none seemed to impress Republicans more that the poverty and degradation of the mass of southern non-slaveholders…. Generally, Republicans blamed the lack of educational opportunities and the degradation of labor in slave society for the position of poor whites. Republicans saw their lack of opportunity to rise in the social scale. The comparative lack of a middle class effectively blocked any hope of social advancement for the mass of poor whites. The Chicago Democratic Press summed up…“Fortunes are frequently inherited in the South- they are rarely made.”
To those with vision of a steadily growing nation, slavery was an intolerable hindrance to national achievement…. What it came down to was whether the western social order would resemble o that of the South or of the North. A West open to slavery would be marked by the same decadence which characterized the South. …[According to Oliver Morton on 1860] “if we do not exclude slavery from the Territories, it will exclude us.” Free white laborers of the North would never migrate to a land where labor was held to be disreputable, where social mobility was all but non-existent, and where they would have to labor in close proximity with Negro slaves…
Republicans felt that by couching their appeal in terms of the effect of slavery upon labor, they stood a better chance of gaining these votes. [This allowed] Republicans to sidestep both the problem of race and effects of slavery on the enslaved. [According to John Van Buren. Republicans] “had no squeamish sensitiveness upon the subject of slavery, no morbid sympathy for the slave,” it was the influence of slavery’s extension upon white labor that concerned them.

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