On April 12th of 1861, the Northern and Southern regions of the United States were at war. For decades, the North and South had many disagreements, and grew further apart as more events occurred. The North and South were two different worlds, yet one country. The two regions had different cultures, and ways of living, and sectional issues began to arise, splitting the once unified nation into two, a Union and a Confederacy. This outbreak of the American Civil War was irrepressible; the economies of the North and the South were very different, there were unresolvable social disagreements between the two regions, and there was a strong political divide between the North and the South, which all led to an inability to compromise, and in turn …show more content…
In his book, The Civil War and Reconstruction, Randall argues the war could have been avoided if the two sides had simply agreed to compromise. If the North or the South had not both been stubborn, then the American Civil War might have never occurred (Randall 374-375). Randall believed that compromises could have prevented the Civil War, however, more compromises would have only postponed the outbreak of the Civil War. Compromises involving the institution of slavery had already been attempted. The Missouri Compromise said that all states below Missouri were slave states, and all states above were free states. This kept tensions low for some time, but eventually this compromise was repealed by the Dred Scott Decision. The Missouri Compromise was later replaced with the Kansas Nebraska Act, an attempted compromise that said the people of the state could vote on whether or not the state would join the union as a slave state. The Kansas Nebraska Act eventually resulted in Bleeding Kansas. Many people migrated to Kansas after the Kansas Nebraska act, and voted in favor of slavery. The vote was tipped towards slave state, which caused abolitionists to become anger, which resulted in a small battle in Kansas, in which about fifteen people were murdered. The compromises that had been made on the topic of slavery, which was the main cause of the division between the North and the South, all eventually failed. The compromises did prevent violence from happening sooner, but they did not put an end to the issues that caused the tensions in the first place. Compromises would have not stopped the outbreak of the war, despite the beliefs of historians like David Donald and J. G