1. Civil War March Madness
You’re going to put what you think is the “winner” between the two causes of the Civil War into the next round. So if you think slavery is more important to the Civil War than Abe Lincoln, it goes to the next line, the Final Four. On the back, you need to write a paragraph justifying why you chose your winner (minimum of 5 sentences).

2. Section Tensions and a Failure of Political Will Led to the Civil War
Causes of the Civil War
Section Tensions and a Failure of Political Will Led to the Civil War

4. #1 Sectional Debates
Tariffs – Many Southerners opposed tariffs (taxes on exports & imports), claiming it as a form of economic imperialism passed by the North.
Nullification Crisis
Extension of Slavery – Many Southerners supported extension of slavery as a means of protecting economic interests.
States’ Rights – Many Southerners believed the central (federal) government was exercising too much power and the states had the right to nullify a law if it harmed a state.
Remember the Democratic-Republicans and the Anti- Federalists?

5. #2 Northern Abolitionists and Southern Defenders
Many Northerners opposed slavery on moral reasons.
Garrison’s Liberator
The slave-based agricultural system of the South did not seem “modern.”
What did the North prefer? (Federalists)
Many Southerners relied on slavery as the basis of the large-scale agricultural economy.
Southerners viewed slavery as a “necessary evil”

6. #3 Dred Scott Decision, 1857
The Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court overturned efforts to limit the spread of slavery.
The court ruled that no black man was a citizen, and that slaves could be taken to free territories because they were property
Like the Kansas-Nebraska Act, this literally nullified the Missouri Compromise Line.
Northerners were outraged!

7. #4 “The little lady who started this war” – Abraham Lincoln
Harriet Beecher Stowe, wife of a New England clergyman, wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a best- selling novel about slavery that inflamed Northern abolitionist sentiment.
Southerners were frightened by the growing strength of Northern abolitionism.
The book itself was based on stereotypes and imagination, as Stowe had never been to a plantation.

8. #5 Ineffective Presidents of the 1850s
Abraham Lincoln’s predecessors failed to resolve the crises surrounding the country’s section issues

9. #6 Failed Compromises

10. #7 Abraham Lincoln Elected as president in 1860
South Carolina first and then the “Deep South” seceded, forming the Confederate States of America.
Lincoln called to raise federal troops in 1861