To what extent was a US Civil War inevitable in the event of a US Research Paper

To what extent was a US Civil War inevitable in the event of a US CIVIL War, to what extent was a Union victory inevitable - Research Paper Example from the American Revolution to the adoption of the Constitution, no one ever doubts that Americans, whether in the South or the North, had a common interest of establishing a prosperous nation. The means to achieving that very end, however, proved contentious, with sectionalism creeping in to widen the rifts between a people that fought their independence together barely a century earlier. To be sure, the origins of the civil war had roots in the first miserable boatload of African slaves into the American soil. The doubtful, as Sydney E. Ahlstrome notes, would be at pains to refute claims that slavery and the sustained mass moral condemnation of the institution was at heart of the conflict (649). Indeed without slavery, the war wouldn’t have occurred. In the 100 years or so of independence, the Southern states remained on an economy largely founded on cotton plantation agriculture aided by the institution of slavery. The North, though had own agricultural resources, was more advanced commercially and industrially, that one state after the other felt the need to abolished slavery. For a time it, it appeared that slavery was on its way to extinction with the remarks of Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson defining the South’s peculiar institution as a â€Å"necessary evil† (Roberts 53). To some, slavery was in every sense a â€Å"positive good† that generated a great deal of foreign exchange at no or low cost for the southerners. So intense were the gridlocks that when the Tariff legislation was finally introduced in the Congress and passed with the aid of Northern politicians, in effect raising the prices of imported goods in favor of the North produ ced goods against the wishes of Southerners long used to shipping their cotton to Europe in return for inexpensive boatloads of European goods, including clothes made from their own cotton, the southerners furor rose to near conflict 30 years to its actual dates. With the new tariff putting foreign goods out of financial