The American Civil War was not caused by real and deep rooted divisions between North and South, but by the manipulation of the public by a small group of Southern fanatics' Do you agree? Explain your answer

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History Coursework Essay

‘The American Civil War was not caused by real and deep rooted divisions between North and South, but by the manipulation of the public by a small group of Southern fanatics’ Do you agree? Explain your answer fully

        The American Civil War can be blamed on many reasons, one of which could be the strategy of the Southern extremist group, the ‘fire eaters’ they claimed that the Southern way of life was in danger of an abolitionist attack and was going to happen imminently. There were some very influential politicians from the South in this radical group, such as William Yancey and Louis Wigfall. Yancey sat in the US congress and over the years his belief in the absolute state rights grew. He resisted the 1850 Compromise and was one of the first to propose a Southern Confederacy in 1858. He also was a major part in the break up of the Democratic Party and disliked the candidacy of Stephen Douglas for the presidential nomination, after those elections of 1860, once Lincoln was elected; he drew up Alabama’s Secession Ordinance. Wigfall was a member of the US Senate and became a leader in the attempt to reassure southern slave-owner’s freedom to live in the territories with their slaves. He also was crucial in the split of the Democratic Party and once the civil war began, he decided to enter military service and become brigade commander.

        One of the most notorious fire-eaters was Robert Barnwell Rhett, he was a political leader of the South and one of the earliest activists in South Carolina, and the family supported Nullification during the Jackson Administration. He spent most of his life pushing for an independent South, convinced that only a Republican victory in the presidential elections of 1860 would result in an independent southern nation, he and other southern secessionists worked hard to bring this about, after Lincoln became president he drafted South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession. As his family owned the Charleston Mercury, Rhett was able to write and edit all the articles in the family newspaper, with this control he was able to dictate what was written and told to the people of South Carolina, this means of spreading the Southern Nationalist views was very influential and the facts were not always correct. This is significant because with this type of power available to them, the articles could be manipulated to fit the Southern extremist ideas and in this way control the South who at this point would trust what they were told from their politicians and newspaper, the situation was like a ‘communication vacuum’ and all the topics were mis-represented as they were not well informed of the facts.

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        The Southerners would trust these ideas because of what had happened in the previous years, such as Lecompton and John Brown’s escapades at Harper’s Ferry and Pottawotomie. In 1855, Kansas elected its first territorial governing body. This body would run a voting poll to decide on the subject of slavery and whether it would be allowed in Kansas or not. Hundreds of pro-slavery believers crossed the border from Missouri into Kansas to cast their vote for slavery to try and balance out the ratio of free and slave states. It is likely that Kansas would have been voted as a ...

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