US Civil War: causes, course and effects (1840–1877)

Cotton — it made up over half of US exports and depended on enslaved labour.

A system that treats enslaved people as property to be bought, sold, and owned, with no legal rights.

An escaped enslaved woman who repeatedly returned South to guide others to freedom via the Underground Railroad.

An armed uprising of enslaved people in Virginia that killed around 55 white people and led to harsher slave codes across the South.

William Lloyd Garrison published The Liberator demanding immediate emancipation; Frederick Douglass, an escaped enslaved man, became a leading Black abolitionist orator and writer.

South Carolina declared a federal tariff void within its borders, asserting states' rights; President Andrew Jackson threatened force before a compromise ended it.

The idea, championed by Stephen Douglas, that settlers in a new territory should vote themselves on whether to allow slavery.

California admitted free, Utah/New Mexico decided by popular sovereignty, a stronger Fugitive Slave Act, and the slave trade (not slavery) banned in Washington DC.

Violent conflict between pro- and anti-slavery settlers in Kansas after the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act let the territory decide slavery by popular vote.

Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debated slavery's expansion during an Illinois Senate race; Lincoln lost the seat but gained national fame.

Lincoln won with almost no Southern electoral votes; the South saw this as proof it had lost control of the federal government, and South Carolina seceded in December 1860.

Slavery was the deeper, root cause driving every major crisis (territorial expansion, compromises, the 1860 election); states' rights was the constitutional language used to defend slavery and justify secession.

The Union's overall strategy: blockade Southern ports, seize the Mississippi River, and split the Confederacy — slow strangulation rather than one big battle.

Much larger population (22m vs 9m, of whom 3.5m enslaved); most of the industry and railways; the existing navy and merchant fleet for a blockade.

Fighting a defensive war on home ground (easier to supply and just needed to survive), and generally stronger senior military leadership early on, especially Robert E. Lee.

Declared enslaved people free only in Confederate states still in rebellion — not in border slave states loyal to the Union. It reframed the war as a fight against slavery and let African Americans enlist in the Union army.

About 180,000 in the army (roughly 10% of Union forces) plus thousands in the navy — for example the U.S. Colored Troops regiments.

Britain would not recognise a slaveholding power once the war became explicitly about ending slavery after 1863, and the Union blockade plus Northern wheat exports reduced Britain's reliance on Confederate cotton.

Gettysburg (July 1863) stopped Lee's invasion of the North; Vicksburg (July 1863) gave the Union control of the whole Mississippi River, splitting the Confederacy in two.

His 1863 presidential Reconstruction plan: a Confederate state could rejoin the Union once 10% of its 1860 voters swore loyalty to the Union and accepted the end of slavery — a lenient, quick-reunion approach.

A tougher line: the Wade-Davis Bill (1864) required 50% loyalty oaths, and after 1867 Congress imposed military rule on the South plus the 14th and 15th Amendments guaranteeing citizenship and Black male suffrage.

Violent intimidation by groups like the Ku Klux Klan (founded 1865-66), and legal methods such as Black Codes and later literacy tests/poll taxes to restrict African American rights and voting.

The Compromise of 1877: disputed presidential election resolved by making Rutherford B. Hayes president in exchange for withdrawing federal troops from the South, ending federal protection of Black civil rights there.

Success: slavery permanently abolished (13th Amendment) and Black citizenship/suffrage written into the Constitution. Failure: most Southern Black Americans remained poor sharecroppers and were soon disenfranchised by Jim Crow laws.