What events accelerated the move towards the coming American Civil War?

The United States prior to the Civil War was a nation of two countries that straddled the slavery divide. Expansion westward in the era of Manifest Destiny exasperated the differences. Between 1812 and 1861 (the antebellum period) the nation wrestled with slavery. The Northern and Southern economies were following two different pathways with the latter  very much reliant on slavery for their agricultural (especially cotton) cultivation. The North was evolving into an industrialized economy to eventually rival Western Europe. It took an anti-slavery position that y clashed with base in the South.

On March 3rd, 1820 the Missouri Compromise banned all slavery north of  36°30′ . Missouri was admitted into the Union as a slave state while Maiine gained entrance as a free state. The 1831 Nat Turner Slave rebellion highlighted tensions in Virginia leading to more brutal slave laws in the South.

A national split was further highlighted by the Wilmot Proviso of 1846 (which passed in the House but failed in the Senate). Its intention was to ensure that slavery was not permitted into the territory captured from Mexico.

In 1850 another compromise granted admission to California into the Union but also introduced strict anti-fugitive slave law that angered the pro-abolitionist North. The anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe further inflamed Northern opposition to slavery.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 (ill-conceived with hindsight) gave permission to the settlers in these territories to choose on a local level whether they wished to permit slavery. The end result of such a reality was regional conflict best epitomized by the phrase ‘Bleeding Kansas’.

Then in 1857 the US Supreme Court ruled on the infamous Dred Scott decision that effectively invalidated the citizenship protection for Blacks. Congress could not ban slavery in their territories.

Sentiments on both sides festered when in 1859 an abolitionist by the name of John Brown attacked an armory in Harpers Ferry. The intent was to ignite a slave revolt. The attack was put down by the marines and Brown was later hanged but the hostility between North and South was reaching a high point.

In November 1860 Abraham Lincoln won the Presidential election on a platform that took a hard line against slavery. For many in the South the writing was on the wall. South Carolina seceded in December 1860 from the Union. They were soon followed by six other Southern States - Mississippi, Florida, Alabama; Georgia, Louisiana and Texas.

The Confederacy was formed in February of 1861 with Jefferson Davis as its first President, Two months later the US Civil War began with the Southern attack on Fort Sumter. Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee would join the other Confederate states  within a further two months of the war’s beginning. Maryland and Kentucky had slave populations but chose to remain in the Union.