The Missouri Compromise and the dangers of history

On 17 February 1819, the United States Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, an event which led to Civil War and the death of thousands. 

The issue, you see, was the expansion of slavery - each state was allowed to rule whether slavery should be legal or illegal in their territory, and at that moment, the number of slave states and the number of free states was exactly equal. However, there was a lot of unpopulated territory in the country which was perfect for growing cotton, and the anti-slavery Northerners were very worried about Southern plantation owners upping sticks to one of these incredibly fertile areas, growing cotton, using slave power to harvest it and then deciding that they would like to make the area into a state of the United States, with senators and congressmen who voted in favour of slavery. This would obviously upset the balance of slave and free states, leaving the North at a disadvantage. 

They proposed that slavery be made illegal in all new states joining the Union, but this would clearly lead to a massive imbalance against the South, which they felt would be very unfair. So naturally a compromise had to be reached, and it was.

It was decided that Missouri would be brought into the Union as a slave state, but at the same time so would the state of Maine, as a free state, thus maintaining the balance. They then drew a big line across a map of the United States, and said that any state entering the Union below this line was permitted to allow slavery, and all those above, weren't. (They weren't just waving a marker pen about; the line in question was the 36°30' line of latitude so it did have some significance geographically.)

However, though the compromise worked in the early part of the nineteenth century, by the middle it was proving a great hindrance and eventually ended up causing Civil War.

Of course, it didn't. The problem with history is that it's impossible to exactly pin down one cause for a great event - some could feasibly argue that the Missouri Compromise caused Civil War, others might say that it was working just fine until it was scrapped in the 1850s by Senator Douglass, who believed that each state should have the right to vote on whether a state was 'free' or not, and introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act to this effect (it was a nice idea, but led to all out war and violence in Kansas, with pro and anti slavery mobs rioting and sometimes killing each other).

Other causes of the Civil War might include, depending on your viewpoint: Abraham Lincoln's winning of the 1860 election on the Republican Party ticket; the huge chasm between Southern and Northern values; slavery itself; the fact that slavery was not outlawed in the whole country when the slave trade was; the Dred Scott court case and its ramifications or even, looking at the very short term, the fact that the Southern states seceded, formed the Confederate States of America and opened fire at Fort Sumter on Northern troops.

A good case could be made for all of those examples being the sole reason for war, but as usual in history, they acted together, and it was only a culmination of all the events which eventually caused war. It is possible, of course, to argue that a certain event was more significant that another event, but it is very, very rare that one person can categorically state that X and X alone was responsible for the American Civil War, or the Reformation, or the decision to give women the vote or whatever. 

This is why I love my subject. You can never be wrong (well, you could if you were to argue that Winston Churchill was the cause of the American Civil War, but very few people try to do this, oddly enough...), and you can argue (read: waffle) your way out of, or into any situation. But seriously, you do learn how to prioritize arguments; review the most important causes of any given event; and critically analyze primary and secondary sources as evidence for and against a particular line of thinking, all very important skills. Which is why the government's proposals for a shake up of the history curriculum are especially worrying; focusing as they do on just one form of history - the 'Britain and the Empire were excellent' one. Michael Gove should realize that just because he learnt it in should, doesn't make it true. If he was a proper student of history, he would know this already...