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There was several reasons the civil war happened, but most were because the South was wanting to break states after Abraham Lincoln became president due to the deal to free slaves they were obviously upset. Abe Lincoln wanted the states to be combined and Fredrick Douglas was also against slavery and a abolitionist.

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Read Transcript...

Slavery had existed in what is now the United States for about 200 years before the south seceded. And, indeed, if you think about it, for the hundreds of years now that we have in American history, freedom for African-Americans occupies a minority of that time, only 150 years. So, African-Americans in this country were slaves much longer than they have been free.

My point is that over hundreds of years, slavery had worked its way into the fabric of American life, the American economy, American culture, American life generally, so the question would be: All right, why now? The union was formed in 1787 under the constitution, with slavery there - and indeed, the constitution protects slavery not by using the name, but by using euphemisms, but it clearly protects slavery. It didn't prevent the union from being created, so why should it now lead to the union falling apart?

The argument goes on: Northerners, white northerners, people say, were just as racist as white southerners, and they oppressed blacks too, not by owning them but by segregating them. So, the argument goes that there's just not a great division among the American people on the issue of race. And, then, when Abraham Lincoln became president, despite his willingness to say in public that slavery was wrong and must someday die, Abraham Lincoln on the day he was inaugurated-and this is a fact that I find is just not very well known-he alluded in his inaugural address to a constitutional amendment that had just been passed by Congress in the days leading up to the inauguration, and that constitutional amendment, by its own terms, protected slavery forever, in the states that wanted to have it, from federal interference. Lincoln was willing to write that into the constitution explicitly, and furthermore that amendment, by its terms, was unamendable.

Now, just imagine if that had gotten into the constitution. So, you can see that if you list out all of these things, and then by the way, you add in that slavery in the south was confined to a rather narrow elite-only one-third of southern white families owned slaves, and only about 12% of southern white families owned more than 20 slaves, putting them in the planter class. Most white southerners didn't own slaves. It doesn't stand to reason that they would go to war to fight for something that didn't concern them or didn't involve them.

So, when you put all of these things together, you can see why people can be dubious about slavery as an explanation of secession.

Now, you asked about why this has a certain about of tension in this discussion and what's at stake here. I think people in the southern part of the United States, people whose ancestors were confederates, have a stake in defending what their ancestors did. They have a certain pride in what their ancestors did. And they want to think that what their ancestors did was based on a loftier cause than the ownership of other human beings, and if I were one of those people I would probably be inclined to make the same argument, to try to explain away the role of slavery in bringing about disunion, and I would reach for one of these other explanations. But as we're saying here is that if you reach for those other explanations, you find flaws in them as well.
Earlier you alluded to one explanation, it's called the "two divergent societies" interpretation. Could you get into that a little bit, and how that explains the causes of disunion?
Just to go back for a second, the argument is not just in terms of owning slaves or not owning slaves or broader economic issues or not understanding the constitution-these are symptoms of a much larger phenomenon, which is that, over time, northern civilization and southern civilization, northern society and southern society had diverged. A lot of this has to do with natural factors: the geography, the topography, the growing season, the rainfall amounts; giving rise to different kinds of economies and different personalities and different characters and different cultures. Not that they need be hostile to one another, but they are different. It's not unnatural, then, for them ultimately go to their separate ways.

Now, you can imagine how people would think of northerners and southerns, white northerners and white southerners being different. Everybody's read Gone With the Wind or seen the movie; it's impossible to imagine that taking place in Massachusetts, and it's impossible to see the Lowell Textile Mills operating in South Carolina. It make sense to us. We can think of the Yankee clerk sitting at his desk with his visor, scrawling numbers on a pad, and we can think of the ebullient South Carolina or Georgia planter out riding around, living outdoors, being hospitable and being gregarious - different personality types. But, these are stereotypes.

Stereotypes usually have a life and an energy that keeps them alive because there's some truth connected to them. But, here's the problem with the "two societies" explanation. The American population was overwhelmingly English speaking, much more so than it is in 2013. Homogeneous language. The American population in 1860 was overwhelmingly Protestant, much more so than it is now. And, specifically Evangelical Protestant, in both sections. Despite what we've been talking about in economic differences, and this is a striking fact-two thirds of white adults males in the North, and two thirds of white adult males in South were farmers of corn and products like that, on family farms, without slaves and without hired hands.

How different is a farmer of corn in Illinois from a farmer of corn in Arkansas or Alabama? Same language, same religion, same occupation for the most part-same beliefs and principles, such as the principle of right to own property, the right to get ahead in the world, the same belief in principle that founded this nation: government by consent of the governed. A common history, especially the history of the American revolution when northerners fought in South Carolina, and George Washington began his career as the commander of the Continental Army in Massachusetts. It just seems very strange to say that these are two separate peoples.

And then finally in this connection, once you've explained the difference, even if you can accept that these sections were different, you haven't explained why they want to go. Think of relationships in our society that are different, men and women. I think you could argue that they're different, but nevertheless they seem to managed to hold their relationships together as often as not. So, once you've identified a difference, if you can, you haven't explained antagonism-and, by the way, once you've explained antagonism, you haven't explained killing.

I ask my students, "How many of you have ever been in a romantic relationship?" and most of the hands will go up. "And how many of you have been, at one point or another, broken up in that relationship?" and most of the hands will go up. I'm analogizing here the south leaving the union. And then I'll say, "And how many of you have then murdered the person who was in the relationship with you?" And no hand goes up.
Well, that's good!
<laughs> In other words, ending the relationship doesn't explain the violence that ensues, to go back to where we came in. So, that's one reason why the two societies explanation-it's had its vogue, it's had its backers, but it doesn't get the traction that puts it at the top of the heap here in competing explanations.
Finally, the last explanation that has been forwarded, and a very provocative phrase, is the "Blundering Generation." Could you talk about that?
Yes. This explanation of secession-that there were no broad, underlying conditions or circumstances or historical forces that were washing over the American people that explain succession; it was the short-term, short-sighted decisions of a generation of blunderers that led us over the edge.

And this school of thought flourished especially after the American people came back from the First World War and asked themselves what that was all about. This terrible, terrible struggle-and people had a hard time explaining what it was all about. And so historians, who always take their cue, even if not fully consciously, from the lives they're living, looked to the past and begin to think, "Could the same thing be said about the Civil War?" And, sure enough, according to some, it could.

The argument goes like this. It ticks off, as we have done, the problems with the extant interpretations, they're not satisfactory. It says, for example, that slavery was a dying institution, that it's hard to imagine that people would fight over the fate of that. That the economic differences weren't crucial, and so forth. The backers of this position clear the field-or think they have-of other interpretations, and say you have to look at the decisions that individuals make.

It begins with the point that, when Jefferson Davis makes the decision to fire on Fort Sumpter in May 1861, the hand that pulls the trigger could decide not to pull the trigger. Abraham Lincoln had many chances to avoid what happened-the first one, of course, is that he could have stayed out of politics and not challenged Stephen Douglas in 1858-but he could have compromised with the south over slavery in the territories, which this school of thought, by the way, the question of slavery in the territories is the focal question of slavery-but this school of thought of thought finds it rather bizarre that people would fight so hard and take such drastic steps to see whether slavery would go into what is now Utah or Nevada or Montana, where slavery, according to them, had no future anyway.

What they're driving at here is that somehow or another, the ambitious politicians played on the emotions of the people over slavery and elevated those emotions beyond any rational basis. And led these hyper-emotionalized people into this war that no one wanted and was needless. And they did it, in part, because they didn't think that's what would happen after they did what they did. They assumed that there would be another compromise and we would go on as we had done before.

The strength of this view is that, of course, whatever else is at work in history, finally you come down to individuals on a given day deciding that they're going to do things. It makes sense, if you think about what you've done today or what you did yesterday, that you could decide to go down a different street. Or open a different door. I can remember during the height of the Cold War in the 1950s or 60s that there were many people who thought that they were going to get into a terrible, terrible war, probably a nuclear war, with the Soviet Union. To some people it seemed inevitable. But day by day, because people did or didn't do various things, it got postponed and got postponed and postponed until finally it becomes, it's not going to happen at all.

And that's what this school of thought thinks was possible, if people had just been more sensible. Now, it has a certain plausibility in that respect. The problem with it is, that it's a judgement on history as well as an explanation of it. That is to say, it's looking back on the 19th century involvement in discussion about slavery, and it's essentially saying, "You fools. You were concerned about something that you shouldn't have been concerned about because it was going to take care of itself, and it was going to die." And we, in the 20th century in our infinite wisdom would never have allowed ourselves to be carried away by something like that.

Ultimately, that kind of judgement from the future, looking back with hindsight, is probably not going to win the approval of a field of historians and others who are trying to come to an explanation about these matters.

So, you've outlined some of the main explanations of disunion. I was wondering if you could assess the state of the field as it stands today?

One of the reasons this subject fascinates me is that you have this tremendous event that occurred in our history, perhaps the most tremendous, and naturally you want to explain it. And there are several plausible explanations and interpretations, and yet each one of these has something about it that leads people to say, "no, no, that's not it." And, what comes out of that is that this is an endless discussion. I would be much less interested in this subject if it was cut and dry and all settled. It's not. The discussion goes on.

And that connection, and I say this to my students, I say the best book, the most persuasive book, on the reasons for secessions, the origins of secession and civil war is yet to be written, and I want to hold out to them the prospect that maybe one of them will write it.

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Episode 22: Causes of the U.S. Civil War (Part 2)

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Read Transcript... Slavery had existed in what is now the United States for about 200 years before the south seceded. And, indeed, if you think about it, for the hundreds of years now that we have in American history, freedom for African-Americans occupies a minority of that time, only 150 years.

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Nowadays The trail Of Tears takes 3 months to walk. The trail of tears was a devastating time, some of them starved to death, this was mostly Native Americans because back when people were forced to change states and they walked months to multiple different areas, and Native Americans also got arrested by white people.

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It was a woman suffrage movement they wanted rights. Back then females did not get the right to vote or work they were only housewives. Then when it came to the civil war females dressed as males to fight in it as confederates or unions.

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If you defend human rights, you defend women’s’ rights.

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Across the globe, many women and girls still face discrimination because of their sex and gender.

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Slave owners  referred to their slaves as "N words" or Negro the N-word with a hard R was used they didn't respect the slaves as humans and discarded their feelings punished them for not working and forced them to work most every single day with not any breaks.

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They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South

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The Musket was made to be a rifle that was reloaded with powder and could sometimes get jammed.  A lot of those weapons were used by both North and the South and yeah. The muskets can shoot up to a whole track away. They were really good weapons and did lots and lots of damage.

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US Civil War Weapons and Tactics   Civil War Technology   Military Documentary Film

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Slavery was a big no-no to people in the North like Abraham Lincoln and other abolitionists.  Slave trade is when slave owners traded their slaves with other slave owners and sold them off. The disagreement on having slaves is what sparked the civil war because the states had their different opinions.

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The Union had the better strategies because they actually had a plan, unlike the confederate where they wanted to get allies and just stay and fight. The Union wanted to flank their supplies ships and all different types of stuff.  They tried blocking off trades, they had iron and money so they can make stuff like railroad tracks. The Union also tried to take over the place the confederate needed to stop them from getting supplies.

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I seen how there was a slave possibly in the South running away from his owners or owner. I noticed that the animals in the book were all trying to help him in some type of way. I wonder why he ran and where he ran too... If i were trying to escape I would run even farther without them noticing and they would not have seen me because I can zoom soooo fast out of there but, I would title this book something like Louisiana or something like a state in the south or RUNNERY. something more interesting.

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Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president and he was an abolitionist and he lead the civil war. He gave supplies to Fort Summer and he lead them to victory although he also freed the slaves. He was a hard-worker he had a stepmom because his real mother died when he was younger. He was a senate before becoming president.

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Returning to the historic era of his greatest success, D.W. Griffith pays homage to the sixteenth President in this drama starring Walter Huston

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Harriet Tubman was a female activist against slavery. She hated slavery and was once a slave herself. She helped multiple slaves and was one of the most wanted slaves because of her attempt to free them. She freed many slaves and taught them where to go to be free. She was known as a hero in the North and By slaves she fought in an army to end slavery she was a nurse.

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When Was Harriet Tubman Born?

Harriet Tubman was born around 1820 on a plantation in Dorchester County, Maryland. Her parents, Harriet ("Rit") Green and Benjamin Ross, named her Araminta Ross and called her "Minty."

Rit worked as a cook in the plantation's "big house," and Benjamin was a timber worker. Araminta later changed her first name to Harriet in honor of her mother.

Harriet had eight brothers and sisters, but the realities of slavery eventually forced many of them apart, despite Rit's attempts to keep the family together. When Harriet was five years old, she was rented out as a nursemaid where she was whipped when the baby cried, leaving her with permanent emotional and physical scars.

Around age seven Harriet was rented out to a planter to set muskrat traps and was later rented out as a field hand. She later said she preferred physical plantation work to indoor domestic chores.

A Good Deed Gone Bad

Harriet's desire for justice became apparent at age 12 when she spotted an overseer about to throw a heavy weight at a fugitive. Harriet stepped between the enslaved person and the overseer-the weight struck her head.

She later said about the incident, "The weight broke my skull ... They carried me to the house all bleeding and fainting. I had no bed, no place to lie down on at all, and they laid me on the seat of the loom, and I stayed there all day and the next."

Harriet's good deed left her with headaches and narcolepsy the rest of her life, causing her to fall into a deep sleep at random. She also started having vivid dreams and hallucinations which she often claimed were religious visions (she was a staunch Christian). Her infirmity made her unattractive to potential slave buyers and renters.

Escape from Slavery

In 1840, Harriet's father was set free and Harriet learned that Rit's owner's last will had set Rit and her children, including Harriet, free. But Rit's new owner refused to recognize the will and kept Rit, Harriet and the rest of her children in bondage.

Around 1844, Harriet married John Tubman, a free Black man, and changed her last name from Ross to Tubman. The marriage was not good, and the knowledge that two of her brothers-Ben and Henry-were about to be sold provoked Harriet to plan an escape.

Harriet Tubman: Underground Railroad

On September 17, 1849, Harriet, Ben and Henry escaped their Maryland plantation. The brothers, however, changed their minds and went back. With the help of the Underground Railroad, Harriet persevered and traveled 90 miles north to Pennsylvania and freedom.

Tubman found work as a housekeeper in Philadelphia, but she wasn't satisfied living free on her own-she wanted freedom for her loved ones and friends, too.

She soon returned to the south to lead her niece and her niece's children to Philadelphia via the Underground Railroad. At one point, she tried to bring her husband John north, but he'd remarried and chose to stay in Maryland with his new wife.

Fugitive Slave Act

The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act allowed fugitive and freed workers in the north to be captured and enslaved. This made Harriet's role as an Underground Railroad conductor much harder and forced her to lead enslaved people further north to Canada, traveling at night, usually in the spring or fall when the days were shorter.

She carried a gun for both her own protection and to "encourage" her charges who might be having second thoughts. She often drugged babies and young children to prevent slave catchers from hearing their cries.

Over the next 10 years, Harriet befriended other abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, Thomas Garrett and Martha Coffin Wright, and established her own Underground Railroad network. It's widely reported she emancipated 300 enslaved people; however, those numbers may have been estimated and exaggerated by her biographer Sarah Bradford, since Harriet herself claimed the numbers were much lower.

Nevertheless, it's believed Harriet personally led at least 70 enslaved people to freedom, including her elderly parents, and instructed dozens of others on how to escape on their own. She claimed, "I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."

Harriet Tubman's Civil War Service

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Harriet found new ways to fight slavery. She was recruited to assist fugitive enslaved people at Fort Monroe and worked as a nurse, cook and laundress. Harriet used her knowledge of herbal medicines to help treat sick soldiers and fugitive enslaved people.

In 1863, Harriet became head of an espionage and scout network for the Union Army. She provided crucial intelligence to Union commanders about Confederate Army supply routes and troops and helped liberate enslaved people to form Black Union regiments.

Though just over five feet tall, she was a force to be reckoned with, although it took over three decades for the government to recognize her military contributions and award her financially.

Harriet Tubman's Later Years

After the Civil War, Harriet settled with family and friends on land she owned in Auburn, New York. She married former enslaved man and Civil War veteran Nelson Davis in 1869 (her husband John had died 1867) and they adopted a little girl named Gertie a few years later.

Harriet had an open-door policy for anyone in need. She supported her philanthropy efforts by selling her home-grown produce, raising pigs and accepting donations and loans from friends. She remained illiterate yet toured parts of the northeast speaking on behalf of the women's suffrage movement and worked with noted suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony.

In 1896, Harriet purchased land adjacent to her home and opened the Harriet Tubman Home for Aged and Indigent Colored People. The head injury she suffered in her youth continued to plague her and she endured brain surgery to help relieve her symptoms. But her health continued to deteriorate and eventually forced her to move into her namesake rest home in 1911.

Pneumonia took Harriet Tubman's life on March 10, 1913, but her legacy lives on. Schools and museums bear her name and her story has been revisited in books, movies and documentaries.

Harriet Tubman: $20 Bill

Tubman even had a World War II Liberty ship named after her, the SS Harriet Tubman.

In 2016, the United States Treasury announced that Harriet's image will replace that of former President and slaveowner Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin (who served under President Trump) later announced the new bill would be delayed until at least 2026. In January 2021, President Biden's administration announced it would speed up the design process to mint the bills honoring Tubman's legacy.

Sources

Early Life. Harriet Tubman Historical Society.

General Tubman: Female Abolitionist was Also a Secret Military Weapon. Military Times.

Harriet Tubman Biography. Biography.

Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged, Residence, and Thompson AME Zion Church. National Park Service.

Harriet Tubman Myths and Facts. Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman Portrait of An American Hero by Kate Clifford Larson, Ph.D.

Harriet Tubman. National Park Service.

Harriet Tubman. National Women's History Museum.

Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People. Harriet Tubman Historical Society.

Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad. National Park Service.

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Harriet Tubman: Facts, Underground Railroad & Legacy | HISTORY

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Harriet Tubman was an escaped enslaved woman who became a "conductor" on the Underground Railroad, leading enslaved people to freedom before the Civil War. She was also a nurse, a Union spy and a women's suffrage supporter.

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Things weren't working so they tried to change stuff "Reform" their society and everyday life, for the better. They had a chart with rights and wrongs things that would get you into "Heaven, and Hell". Some Volunteered to spread the word on how they could get to Heaven or how they would get into Hell. They believed in punishment to kids and punishing people sending them to Insane Asylums. Slaves were becoming defiant there was day-to-day resistance, there was Open Defiance, and Running away. Slaves would openly disrespect their owners by not doing work, some got difficult by talking back and even getting physical.

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John Brown was known as a killer and murderer in the South but in the North, he was known as a hero. He was against slavery he fought against the Army in know known as West Virginia To free slaves. He wanted slaves to fight alongside him but they ended up getting overwhelmed and John Brown's sons died for the cause. He was found guilty and was executed he was an Abolitionists and was put on trial and executed.

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They started by making airplanes. Then they made cars there were many problems, with land, pollution but they did many good things back then.

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There are many kids and women who were working in factories from the age of 7 and maybe younger. There were many problems with the number of people there was pollution and way more. People were working in factories. Around this time they were also working on a better way to travel.

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This was a war between Mexicans and Texans and the defenders ended up dying and hurting.   They also got executed.  This battle raged on for about an hour and 30 minutes. After 12 days there were no more defenders at the end they were executed.

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Manifest Destiny was when they went to get land or settled to different lands and there was a painting called "Manifest Destiny" which had an angel which I think represented peace for the settlers and there were lots of animals. There were pioneers and settlers all heading out towards the west.

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The Donnor party turned into a cannibal when their attempt to go towards the west didn't really work out it didn't help and some turned to cannibal 41 made it out out of 84. The photo below is a picture of the Donnor party and the wagons that were used.

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The westward expansion is where multiple people went towards the west and there were multiple different people who went to the west such as women, people who were not religious, and more. The Donnor family were among the rest who didn't quite make it.