by Teddy
The Civil War was caused by a series of unfortunate events that divided the north and south that eventually caused the Civil War.
The first of these events happened when in 1819, Congress tried creating a bill to add Missouri to the United States as the 23rd state. However, when a representative tried sneaking in an antislavery amendment to the bill, an ugly debate ensued over slavery and whether the government had the right to restrict it. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise was approved by Congress, adding Missouri and Maine to the United States.
In order to maintain an equal number of slave and free states in the United States, Missouri was declared a slave state and Maine was declared a free state. In addition, all states west of Missouri and whose southern borders were north of latitude 36*30 were declared free states. The Missouri Compromise is generally cited as the beginning of the discourse that happened leading up to the Civil War. Later on, several new states would be added to the United States, with each one causing heated debates in the House and the Senate over whether they should be slave or free states.
By 1856, debates in Congress regarding slavery had become so heated that members of congress started bringing firearms for self-defense. In 1857, the landmark supreme court case Dred Scott v. Sandford happened, where the Supreme Court decided 7-2 that a slave living in a free state was not entitled to their freedom, that African Americans could never be U.S. citizens, and that the Missouri compromise was unconstitutional. This ruling is now famously remembered as one of the worst rulings in the Supreme Court’s history, as it ignored precedent, distorted history, and ignored parts of the constitution in order to deliver a ruling that aligned with the pro-slavery ideals of the South.
In 1860, South Carolina became the first state to attempt to officially secede from the Union (U.S.). Over the following year, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina would all attempt to secede from the Union, following a belief that the south had lost their voice in the government. These states would then organize as the Confederate States of America. The war started on April 12th, 1861 when a Confederate militia attempted to seize Fort Sumter, a government-owned fort in Charleston, South Carolina.