John Brown and the American Civil war

John Brown (May 9, 1800– December 2, 1859)
was a white American abolitionist who advocated and practiced armed insurrection as a means to abolish all slavery.  He led the Pottawatomie Massacre in 1856 in Bleeding Kansas and the unsuccessful raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859.

President Abraham

Lincoln said he was a "misguided fanatic" and Brown has been called "the most controversial of all 19th-century Americans."[1]  His attempt in 1859 to start a liberation movement among enslaved African Americans in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, electrified the nation. He was tried for treason against the state of Virginia and was hanged, but his behavior at the trial seemed heroic to millions of Americans. Southerners alleged that his rebellion was the tip of the abolitionist iceberg and represented the wishes of the Republican Party, but those charges were vehemently denied by the Republicans.  

Historians agree that the Harpers Ferry raid in 1859 escalated tensions that a year later led to secession and the American Civil War.  

Causes of the war:

The coexistence of a slave-owning South with an increasingly anti-slavery North made conflict inevitable. Lincoln did not propose federal laws against slavery where it already existed, but he had, in his 1858 House Divided Speech, expressed a desire to "arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction".[3]

Much of the political battle in the 1850s focused on the expansion of slavery into the newly created territories.[4][5][6]  All of the organized territories were likely to become free-soil
states, which increased the Southern movement toward secession. Both North and South assumed that if slavery could not expand it would wither and die.[7][8][9] 

Southern fears of losing control of the federal government to antislavery forces, and Northern fears that the slave power already controlled the government, brought the crisis to a head in the late 1850s. Sectional disagreements over the morality of slavery, the scope of democracy and the economic merits of free labor vs. slave plantations caused the Whig and "Know-Nothing" parties to collapse, and new ones to arise (the Free Soil Party in 1848, the Republicans in 1854, the Constitutional Union in 1860). In 1860, the last remaining national political party, the Democratic Party, split along sectional lines.

Both North and South were influenced by the ideas of Thomas Jefferson. Southerners emphasized, in connection with slavery, the states' rights[10][11][12] ideas mentioned in Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions. Northerners ranging from the abolitionist William 
Lloyd Garrison to the moderate Republican leader Abraham Lincoln[13] emphasized Jefferson's declaration that all men are created equal. Lincoln mentioned this proposition in his Gettysburg
Address.

Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens said that slavery was "the cornerstone of the Confederacy" after Southern states seceded. After Southern defeat, Stephens said that the war was not about slavery but states' rights, and became one of the most ardent defenders of the Lost Cause.[14]

All but one inter-regional crisis involved slavery, starting with debates on the three-fifths clause and a twenty year extension of the African Slave Trade in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. There was controversy over adding the slave state of Missouri to the Union that led to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Nullification Crisis over the Tariff of 1828 (although the tariff was low after 1846[15]), the Gag rule that prevented discussion in Congress of petitions for ending slavery from 1835–1844, the acquisition of Texas as a slave state in 1845 and Manifest Destiny as an argument for gaining new territories where slavery would become an issue after the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), which resulted in the Compromise of 1850.[16]

The Wilmot Proviso was an attempt by Northern politicians to exclude slavery from the territories conquered from Mexico.  The extremely popular antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe greatly increased Northern opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.[17][18]

The 1854 Ostend Manifesto was a Southern attempt to take over Cuba as a slave state. Even rival plans for Northern vs. Southern routes for a transcontinental railroad became entangled in the Bleeding Kansas controversy over slavery. The Second Party System broke down after passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which replaced the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery with popular sovereignty. In 1856 Congressional arguments over slavery became violent when Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina attacked Radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner with a cane after Sumner's "Crime against Kansas" speech.[19]

The Dred Scott Decision and Lecompton Constitution of 1857 were Southern attempts to admit Kansas to the Union as a slave state. The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, John Brown's raid in 1859 and the split in the Democratic Party in 1860 polarized the nation between North and South. The election of Lincoln in 1860 was the final trigger for secession. 

During the secession crisis, many sought compromise. Two of these attempts were the "Corwin Amendment" and the "Crittenden Compromise." All attempts at compromise failed.

Other factors include sectionalism (caused by the growth of slavery in the deep South while slavery was gradually phased out in Northern states) and economic differences between North and South, although most modern historians disagree with the extreme economic determinism of historian Charles Beard.[20]

There was the polarizing effect of slavery that split the largest religious denominations (the ethodist, Baptist and Presbyterian churches)[21] and controversy caused by the worst cruelties of slavery (whippings, mutilations and families split apart). The fact that seven immigrants out of eight settled in the North, plus the fact that twice as many whites left the South for the North as vice versa, contributed to the South's defensive-aggressive political behavior.[22]

Southern secession was triggered by the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln[23] because regional leaders feared that he would stop the expansion of slavery and put it on a course toward extinction. 

Many Southerners thought either Lincoln or another Northerner would abolish slavery, and that it was time to secede. The slave states, which had already become a minority in the House of Representatives, were now facing a future as a perpetual minority in the Senate and Electoral College against an increasingly powerful North.

The actual causes of the war were a complex series of events, which included slavery, that began long before the first shot was fired. Competing nationalisms, political turmoil, the definition of freedom, the fate of slavery and the structure of our society and economy could all be listed as significant contributing factors in America's bloodiest conflict.