Who Were Some of the Individuals That Contributed to the Coming of the Civil The Civil War was brought about by many important people, some that wanted to preserve and some that wanted to eradicate the primary cause of the war, slavery. There were the political giants, such as Abraham Lincoln, and Stephen Douglas. There were seditious abolitionists such as John Brown, escaped slaves such as Dred Scott, and abolitionist writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe. These were the people who, ultimately, brought a beginning to the end of what Lincoln called a moral, a social, and a political wrong(Oates 66). Southern states, including the 11 states that formed the Confederacy, depended on slavery to support their economy. Southerners used slave labor to produce crops, especially cotton. Although slavery was illegal in the Northern states, only a small proportion of Northerners actively opposed it. The main debate between the North and the South on the eve of the war was whether slavery should be permitted in the Western territories recently acquired during the Mexican war, which included New Mexico, part of California, and Utah. Opponents of slavery were concerned about its expansion, in part because they did not want to compete against slave labor(Oates 15). In 1851, a literary event startled the country. Harriet Beecher Stowe, an Americanwriter and abolitionist, wrote an antislavery novel, Uncle Toms Cabin, that waspublished serially in a newspaper and in book form in 1852. It was a forceful indictment of slavery and one of the most powerful novels of its kind in American literature. The success of the book was unprecedented, selling 500,000 copies in the United States alone within five years, and it was translated into more than 20 foreign languages(Oates 29). It was widely read in the States and abroad, and moved many to join the cause of abolition. The South indignantly denied this indictment of slavery. Stowes book increa...
