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Adam Rodney——The coming of the Civil War was a lengthy and tumultuous road based on the economic and political sectionalism of the country’s two main regions, the North, usually referring to the states above the Mason-Dixon line (36′30), and the South (the slaveholding states below the Mason-Dixon line and Maryland). The North, which was chiefly a manufacturing region, found itself in conflict with the agricultural South. The two different regions required different political and economic policies. As the United States became more established and was able to focus its attention on economics rather than simple survival, the two regions increasingly were at odds.

The first conflict between the two regions that signaled the appearance of serious trouble was the Missouri Compromise of 1820. This compromise, which bartered the admission of Missouri into the Union as a slave state in return for prohibiting slavery above the 36′30 line, was a signal of sectional problems to come. In 1833, the problem of sectionalism reared its head again with the Nullification Crisis, during which South Carolina first made rumblings about secession from the Union.

During the 1840s, radical abolitionism (anti-slavery) grew as more and more Northerners began worrying about the power of the slaveholding South. Slave rebellions in the South confirmed Northern opinion that slavery was neither a moral nor a humane institution, and abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison led the assaults against proslavery.

The final attempt at healing the Union through peaceful means was Henry Clay’s Compromise of 1850, which nullified the Missouri Compromise and left decisions on slavery to individual states. By 1854, sectionalism had progressed to the point wherein neither region of the country was willing to accept the proposed Kansas-Nebraska Act. Left to solve the question of slavery by themselves, the people of Kansas broke out in violence that lasted for four years, until it was finally settled that Kansas would be a free state. In 1859, another Kansas resident, John Brown, had his say on the slavery issue by attacking Harper’s Ferry in Virginia. His eventual capture and death crystallized sectionalist opinion on the slavery question: in the South he was vilified, in the North seen as a martyr.
Furious with the outcome of Kansas and aware of their own weakening power in Congress, the South opposed the 1860 election of Republican Abraham Lincoln to no avail. Lincoln was elected without the support of a single Southern state. Shortly after his election, South Carolina issued her declaration of secession, sparking a string of secession declarations by the other states of the deep South.