Grant

Ulysses S. Grant’s life and career spanned three key eras in 19th century US history: The American Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age. The first of these, the Civil War, had causes rooted in the United States’ history with slavery. Basically, the United States had become divided between “slave states,” where slavery was still accepted, and free states, where slavery had been outlawed. The number of “slave states” overlapped with the Southern United States. In the South, the economy was still rural and agrarian, depending on labor-intensive crops like cotton and tobacco. Also, politics were dominated by the wealthy owners of large, slave-dependent plantations. As for the North, the economy was city-based, commercial, and industrializing. While slavery was increasingly banned by nations around the Americas, northerners increasingly advocated for outlawing slavery across the United States; not only for moral reasons, but also because slavery was seen as a serious drain on the nation’s economy and a reason why the South was failing to industrialize. Tensions escalated once the United States won the Mexican-American War, annexing territories stretching from Texas to California and raising questions of whether any future states will allow slavery or not. Legislative attempts were made to reach a balance, such as the Missouri Compromise and the Kansas-Nebraska Act.