#Why did the civil wars break up reddit series#

When 80,000 Forty-Niners poured into California after the discovery of gold there in 1848, they organized a state government and petitioned Congress for admission to the Union as the 31st state. These opposing views set the terms of conflict for the next decade.

#Why did the civil wars break up reddit series#

Calhoun introduced instead a series of resolutions affirming that slaveholders had the constitutional right to take their slave property into any United States territory they wished. In the Senate, southern strength defeated this proviso. In the House of Representatives, northern congressmen pushed through the Wilmot Proviso specifying that slavery should be excluded in all territories won from Mexico.

The question whether slavery could expand into the 700,000 square miles of former Mexican territory acquired by the United States in 1848 polarized Americans and embittered political debate for the next dozen years. The origins of the American Civil War lay in the outcome of another war fought 15 years earlier: the Mexican-American War. The Wilmot Proviso specified slavery should be excluded in all territories won from Mexico. Why did Americans fight each other with a ferocity unmatched in the Western world during the century between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the beginning of World War I in 1914? More Americans were killed in action that September day near Sharpsburg, Maryland, than died in combat in all the other wars fought by the United States in the 19th century combined.

The number of casualties suffered in a single day at the battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, was four times the number of Americans killed and wounded at the Normandy beaches on D day, June 6, 1944. If the same percentage of Americans were to be killed in a war fought today, the number of American war dead would exceed 6 million. It was also the most traumatic experience endured by any generation of Americans.ДЄt least 620,000 soldiers lost their lives in the war, 2 percent of the American population in 1861. The Civil War had a greater impact on American society and the polity than any other event in the countryвЂ™s history. An 1870 engraving of the Battle of Gettysburg, possibly Pickett s charge.