To what extent did slavery contribute to the cause of the Civil War? A huge part, but not the only contributing factor. Slavery has always been a problem since the country's founding in 1776 and was a major reason for the war, but there were other contributing factors as well. One of the causes that led to the Civil War was Eli Whitney's invention of Cotton Gin. When the cotton gin was invented, it helped cotton plantations successfully extract seeds from cotton bolls, going from about a pound a day for a single person to 50 pounds a day. The Northern states relied on cotton from the Southern states, and the Southern states depended on the manufactured goods, credit, and shipping of the Northern states. Southern states relied on nearly 4 million slaves to help with their crops and had a strong need for slavery, while Northern states were not as dependent and viewed it completely oppositely than the South. One of the issues that led to the Civil War was the end of the Mexican War and popular sovereignty. With the Compromise of 1850 which allowed California to be a free state and gave Utah and New Mexico the choice to decide whether they wanted to be a free state or a slave state. There were many different abolitionist activities before the Civil War that could have been considered contributing factors. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which forced government officials to arrest any fugitive slave and increased the Underground Railroad's involvement in helping slaves escape to Canada. The novel Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe was written in 1852 and offers a very accurate description of slave life. The mini-civil war in Kansas, better known as Bleeding Kansas, was a contributing factor to the...... half of the paper slaves in the South. The role of women in the first half of the 19th century took an active role in asserting their independence in the early to mid-19th century by targeting acts that threatened their family life. Some examples of these threats were prostitution, excessive drinking and gambling, illiteracy, and even slavery. Some of the changes going on at the time were in family and gender roles. One of these phenomena of changing social attitudes was the factory system. More and more women in urban and black areas left home in search of outside work, to meet even the minimum income to stay afloat. Women also left home to join reform societies such as the New York Female Moral Reform Society, a group dedicated to helping put an end to such activities that infringed on their healthy family life..