Doreen Bärwolf 
The Causes of the American Civil War 

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject Didactics for the subject English – Applied Geography, grade: 1, 3, http://www.uni-jena.de/ (Anglistisch/Amerikanistisches Institut), course: Landeskunde – Major Evants and Figures in American History, language: English, abstract: The American Civil War of 1861 to 1865, was one of the most important and worst events in American history. This extremely bloody and cruel war, in which Americans fought against themselves, had many causes. From the Decleration of Independence 1776 to the war itsself, many problems concerning morality, the Westward movement, slavery and ethnicity occured. Nowadays many people think that there was only one reason for the Civil War – namely slavery. Keeping this strong generalisation in mind, I want to explain that here were quite a lot of factors and events piled up over decades to explode in the 1860´s.
The following chapters will explain the situation from 1820 to the beginning of the Civil War. I am going to start with the situation in the 1850´s and before and go on with the war against Mexico an its aftermath. After that I want to decode the complicated situation about the decisions on slavery, based on the two chapters before. In the last two parts of the text the last steps to the Civil War will be described in detail. That includes the “Kansas-Nebraska-Act” and the election of Abraham Lincoln to president. All these events named are known as the maincauses of the Civil War by historians, on which this assignment is based.