this is s here and I'm with Kim Cutz who's Khan Academy's American history content fellow and what I'm curious about is you know in in in in school you learn about the Civil War you learn about slavery uh that slavery was a cause of the Civil War but at least for myself I never got a full context of you know what were all the Dynamics that led to the Civil War is it just something that happened overnight oh definitely not you know I think the seeds of the Civil War were really with the United States at its creation you know I think there's a sort of an essential contradiction in the United States as it's born you know where this country where all men are created equal except that most of the states in the South have slavery where people are clearly not created equal so you know they couldn't win the Revolutionary War without including those States and kind of giving them what they wanted and retaining slavery but it means that you know the US is born with both free states and slave states and they're going to continue to try to figure out how to balance those for the rest of the 1800s and we have this map here and this map is a a later period but it shows the this is actually closer to the Civil War but if we even look at the original 13 colonies you can see which ones were free states and which ones were which ones were slave states and then you obviously have these other states that come in later which we'll which we'll talk about but this what you're saying is the founding of the country this was already an issue people were you know there were people in the north who weren't fans of slavery and and people knew that at some point this was being IR irreconcilable or maybe they HED it would be reconcilable uh a difference but they said no we got to unify against Great Britain exactly so they said let's just become a country and do it you know even Thomas Jefferson uh the author of the Declaration of Independence he knew that slavery was a contradiction he called the issue of having slavery like holding a wolf by the ears right you can't hold on to it but you can't let it go because because so many of the wealthy Elites who are going to end up in Congress in the South are slave owners so they including himself exactly so they want to protect their interests so we have that that it's you know the issue is there from from the the moment that the country is founded and then we get into the 1800s which is really the runup you know the Civil War doesn't start until you know we get into 1860 or or or shortly thereafter what or actually 1860 uh what is you know what are what are the what's what's the big picture really leads up to it well I think what we're looking at when we get into the issues that lead to the Civil War is really about how the US handles getting new territory right and the US was getting a lot of new territory we have a map here I guess the first really big chunk is you have the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and so you get all of see let me shade it in you get you know roughly all of this stuff right over here so that's new areas that that settlers can go and right and and uh it becomes officially part of the us and what else happens so you know as we get these new territories out of them you're going to get new States and when new States come into the Union they're going to come in as either free states or slave states so you know we've balanced the interests of the North and South up until this point right from the Revolutionary War so that there's equal representation in Congress between free states and slave states well why does why does someone care if I'm you know if I'm someone in Massachusetts why do I care whether the new state of Missouri is going to be a free state or a slave state well I think there there are two reasons why you might care um first you know if you're an abolitionist and these are the people who we know very well like Frederick Douglas or William Lloyd Garrison who was the editor of the newspaper the Liberator these are the people who feel that correctly slavery is morally wrong you know slavery is a Corruption of the essential principles on which the country was founded um it's something that you know destroys lives destroys families but another reason if you're say in Massachusetts or Pennsylvania why you might care whether a new slit state is a slave state is you're worried about opportunities for yourself out in the west you know we know that Horus gley this famous newspaper editor he says now what do you do if you're a young man in New York a young white man who doesn't know how to get ahead he says go west young man you know you can go out there you can get some land you can start a farm but if you go out there and you find that all of the land has been bought up by Rich slaveholders from the south you might not be able to get any land and you certainly might not be able to for example sell your corn at a rate low enough that you could beat somebody who has Free Labor so there was a you know a lot of times there's a lot of focus on the moral argument which is a very strong argument but there's also this this interesting economic argument which you what you just talked about which is it's hard to compete with slavery I mean you're literally talking about Labor that does not need traditional wages right that is literally slave labor and so if you are having your own farm and you aren't you you don't own slaves how are you going to compete with that and so that was the reason some folks in the north on economic arguments now would these people be considered abolitionists no the way that we think about those um we call them anti-slavery so anti-slavery Advocates they they don't think that they can get rid of slavery in the South even if they don't like slavery in the South they don't even see how it would be possible to get rid of it but they do think that as these new states are coming into the Union they could prevent them from becoming slave states so that it's possible for the Western lands to remain free um you know Abraham Lincoln I think is a really good poster child for this you know we I think we'll talk about him a little bit more later but Lincoln is born in Kentucky one of these new Western States his father is a small white farmer and slave owners move into Kentucky later you know becomes a slave a slave state and his father can't find work his father can't find land so he ends up first having to move to Indiana then moving to Illinois so this is literally a case of one of these poor white farmers who just can't compete with slavery which is one reason why Lincoln himself is later going to come out so strongly in favor of making sure there's no slavery in the west so abolitionists want to slavery is is is immoral it needs to be removed from definitely the United States possibly the world absolutely anti-slavery they also think slavery is bad they don't like it right uh they think it's well but I'm not going to fight that fight to remove it maybe that's hard to do or impossible but shouldn't spread it's not fair it's the reason my dad wasn't able to to be able to run his farm absolutely and so when we get it so that's you know you have the Louisiana Purchase you know in other videos we talk that's famously Napoleon sold it for quite cheap because frankly he couldn't defend it because he was fighting these wars and he's fighting these wars in Europe that's the big F that's the first chunk of land so you have all of these states and they need to figure out whether they're they're slave slave states or free states but why would I mean I talked about why would a northerner care whether a slave or a free state why would a southerner care why would if I'm a if I'm a slave owner I own a plantation in South Carolina or Georgia why do I care if Missouri is a slave state or a free state well I think you know just as their political interests are tied up in slavery all of their money is tied up in slavery you know in 1860 the most valuable thing that anyone owns in the United States is slaves right you can't you can't compete with that kind of money so they want to make sure that if a new state comes into the Union that state isn't a free state because then the free states might have more representation in Congress and then they can vote to outlaw slavery so if your whole Fortune is built on slavery if you're a white slave owner um they outlaw that then you're left with nothing I see so in the north there's the moral argument there's the economic argument slavery slavery is hard to compete with and the South hey if if we have too many of these free states at some point they're going to have a majority you know enough of a voting power in the government to uh to to to maybe abolish slavery one day which would completely undermine if I'm a slave owner my you know my my my economics of of My reality right I mean and they are sort of essentially aoral even you know someone like Jefferson who knows that slavery is wrong his whole wealth his whole Fortune his whole political Dynasty is built on the fortune of owning slaves and and you know one of the the the first point where this you know this really gets balanced this issue is we have Louisiana Purchase in in 1803 then starting to carve out the Louisiana Purchase you have States like Missouri they get to their critical mass of of people of population so that they can become a state and so what was the Missouri Compromise all about 1820 so the Missouri Compromise is when you know we have enough people living in Missouri you know these are white people generally coming who have come from the eastern states and they apply for Statehood you've got an equal number of slave states and free states already in Congress so if Missouri comes in and they want to be a slave state they're going to upset the apple cart they're going to upset the balance so there will be more representatives for the South than there will be for north and everything they've done so far has been predicated on this sort of tenuous balance between free states and uh slave states so you know they debate this in Congress just for months and eventually what they do is say all right well we can't decide so what we're going to do is admit the state of Maine at the same time and admin I mean Maine the territory of Maine was already part of the United States what I mean how is it not already a a state uh it was part of Massachusetts but as you can see you know it's really only tenuously connected to Massachusetts so they divide this territory up so that it can have its own representation in Congress so they say all right well we can't solve this problem of the balance of power between free states and slave states right now so what we're going to do is just kind of extend our balance we're going to keep this compromise going to make sure that there are the same number of free and slave states so we'll let Missouri in as a slave state at the same time we let Maine in as a free state fascinating so I think I mean I see where this is going that you have these very tenuous compromise while more and more territory is being added it's exciting to see where where all of this goes