At Fort Sumter, on April 12 1861, the first shot was fired by General Pierre Beauregard of South Carolina in attack at the Northern garrison situated in Confederate territory. The bombardment of Fort Sumter was the opening engagement of the American Civil War. This shows that the South were the ones who began the war, showing the first acts of aggression towards the North in the Civil War. By being the ones to provoke conflict of the Civil War, the South succeeded in uniting against them what remained of the United States in 1861, by pushing Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri closer towards the Union.
Republicans in the North believed in the existence of the ‘Slave Power Conspiracy’, which had seized control of the federal government and was attempting to distort the Constitution for its own purposes. The ‘Slave Power’ idea gave the Republicans the anti-aristocratic appeals which men like Seward had long wished to be connected with politically. By combining older anti-slavery arguments with the suggestion that slavery posed a threat to Northern free labour and democratic principles, it allowed the Republicans to tap into the democratic viewpoint which lay at the centre of the Northern association.
However not all can be blamed upon the South for pushing the Union and the Southern Confederacy into war, the North also had some hand in aggression towards the South. As the nation grew in size, so did the opportunities for expansion westward. Many felt that slavery should be allowed in the new territories such as Kansas and Missouri, while others were set against it. A radical abolitionist from Kansas named John Brown rose to fame in his hometown by killing five pro-slavers at Pottawotomie. On the night of May 24, 1856, John Brown and his company of Free State volunteers murdered five men settled along the Pottawotomie Creek in south-eastern Kansas. The victims were prominently associated with the pro-slavery Law and Order Party, but were not themselves slave owners. The Pottawotomie killings caused south-eastern Kansas to end up in guerrilla warfare. Raiders from Missouri terrorised the Free Soilers, while travelling gangs of Free State volunteers imposed similar violence upon their pro-slavery neighbours. While neither John Brown nor any members of his company were arrested for their participation at Pottawotomie, his two eldest sons were seized by mobs and nearly lynched. Most of the books written by members of the abolitionist community in the years after Brown's own execution in 1859, downgraded this blemish on the otherwise rich career of their holy warrior. James Redpath, the first in a long line of biographers who 'martyred' Brown, criticises the whole episode as a pro-slavery conspiracy to criticise both Brown and his cause. The Reverend H.D. Fisher makes mention of the "Pottawotomie Creek disaster", but otherwise commends the qualities of Brown's selfless campaign for freedom. Brown himself is alleged to have acted cautiously whenever asked about the incident, and never admitted his direct responsibility. The Pottawotomie killings remain a gruesome and mysterious side of the lead up to War which took place in the Kansas Territory.
Another of Brown’s escapades was when he raided the Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, in the hopes of supplying weapons to an army of slaves that would revolt against their southern masters. A number of people were taken hostage and several killed, among them the mayor of Harpers Ferry. Brown was cornered with several of his supporters in a fire engine house, first by Virginian soldiers and then by Federal troops sent to arrest him and his raiders. These troops, commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee, stormed the building and captured Brown and several of his men. Brown was tried for his crimes, found guilty, and hung in Charlestown. Though John Brown's raid had failed, it fuelled the passions of northern abolitionists who made him a martyr. It was reported that bells tolled in sympathy to John Brown in northern cities on the day he was executed. The South saw this as a plot to end slavery by force, especially as Brown favoured the slaughter of white slave-owners. This also inflamed passions in the South when southern leaders used the incident as another reminder how little their interests were represented in Federal law; the North was labelled as sympathetic to runaways and against the Fugitive Slave Law and anti-slavery organizations. Rumours began spreading through the South about further slave rebellions, which led to groups of slave owners gathering together to set up vigilante groups, determined to take the law into their own hands in the event of another attempted rebellion. This pushed the preciously sceptical Southerners into starting to believe the once paranoid speeches they had heard form extremists, the fire-eaters.
In conclusion, I do not think that the outbreak of the civil war can be wholly placed on the shoulders of the Deep South, as they were not the only ones who were aggressive towards the other. They did have a large part however, in the break down of communication between North and South as they were not ready to compromise and were not willing to show the whole picture to the Southern people, when they had control over the South, such as through the media. Journalists such as the Rhett family owned and edited their own newspaper, the ‘Charleston Mercenary’, by having this they were able to decide what went into the paper, what stayed out and how everything was written. They were able to mould the South to their way of thinking.
However, Northerners, such as John Brown and his ‘army’ were also to blame; they caused a substantial amount of damage by being aggressive towards the South and their views on slavery. Problems with slavery, particularly slavery expansion, led ultimately to the Civil War. Had the South acted rationally in 1860, there need not have been a war; however, it is difficult to see how war could have been prevented.