Portal:American Civil War/Selected article/12

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The Origins of the American Civil War lay in the complex issues of party politics, competing understandings of federalism, slavery, expansionism, sectionalism, economics, and modernization in the Antebellum period. After the Mexican-American War, the issue of slavery in the new territories led to the Compromise of 1850. While the Compromise of 1850 averted an immediate political crisis, it did not permanently resolve the issue of the power of slaveholders in national politics. Many Northerners, especially the new Republican Party, considered slavery a great national evil, and believed that a small number of Southern owners of large plantations controlled the national government. Southerners denied there was a "slave power conspiracy" and worried instead about the relative political decline of their region as the North grew much faster in terms of population and industrial output. For a chronology of events leading to the American Civil War, see Origins of the American Civil War timeline.