So far, several attempts have been made to bring peace between the anti-slavery North and the pro-slavery South. The South feels the need for slavery in order to maintain its plantation economy, while the North is industrialized and believes there is no need for slaves. When tensions were reignited between the two sides in the 1820s, the Missouri Compromise was put into place, making Missouri a slave state and Maine a free state. The Compromise of 1850 was also put into effect in order to appease people, and most importantly uphold the union. However, despite these agreements, John Brown, a Northern abolitionist, raided Harper’s Ferry. This proves that the efforts have been to no avail. Tension has also only continued to build since then. A resolution must be reached as soon as possible regarding slavery …show more content…
The Democrats, are pro-slavery, but they were unable to take control due to a split within the party. Lincoln’s views on slavery are not clear, but he does wish for the slaves to fight for the Union. Due to this, the state of South Carolina has seceded. Other Southern States may follow South Carolina’s example and secede as well if something is not done. I am Alexander Stephens and I am member of the Whig Party and a Representative from Georgia. The Whig party has recently split and I align myself with the Southern Whig Party members who support the Democratic ideology regarding slavery and popular sovereignty. Like them, I believe that we must fight for the state’s right to control laws and slavery. However, at the same time I wish to prevent the disintegration of the Union. I know this is contrary to many Southern Representatives who believe that secession is the best option, but I believe that we can convince the North that the states should have more powers and that the laws on slavery should stay the same. Secession should only be a last resort if no headway is made in the right
Lincoln was a Republican from the North and was against expanding slavery. This would be the first time many (Southerners) would refuse to accept the results of the election. In the end, many of the southern states would withdraw from the union. They would go on to create their own national capitol in the south. They would call themselves the confederate states.
With the pressure following the passage of the Kansas Nebraska Act, many northerners opposed slavery and were concerned with the possibility of its expansion. In 1856, these northerners formed a new political party called the Republican Party. Once Abraham Lincoln was nominated as the Republican candidate, the South began making plans to secede from the union if Lincoln was elected as President of the United States. In the “South Carolina Declaration of Causes of Secession”, delegates state, “A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. ”15
The Compromise of 1877 was brought to attention recently, shortly after the Presidential Election of 1876. It called to resolve the disputed 1876 presidential elections in the United States. This was supposedly a deal to make it so Rutherford Hayes, the Republican Party candidate running for president, could become president. The Democrats would also become powerful in the governments within the South. Having Hayes, when he would become president, promise to allow troops to be pulled out of the rebelling states and slave states out of the South, it would the Democrats to become just that.
The founding fathers of the nation Compromised on writing the constitution, producing a union of thirteen sovereign and independent states, the structure of the legislature, the election procedure of Congressmen, the powers of each branch of government and the existence of slavery. Years down the line, however, the strength of the union almost came apart when Missouri applied for admission into the union as a slave state. The Northerners were for slavery while the Southerners were for its abolition and this was exposed quite plainly by the debates carried out on the floor of Congress. This came on the backdrop of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which saved the country from Civil war and secession but did nothing to address the issue of slavery in their midst. Between 1820 and 1850, a number of slaves revolted seeking to gain their freedom.
Stephen A. Douglas was a key member of the group that created the Compromise of 1850. This compromise was a combination of five laws. The Fugitive Slave Act was to appease the south, the addition of California as a free state for the north, set a disputed boundary between New Mexico and Texas, abolished slave trade in the District of Columbia, and organized land acquired from Mexico into the new territories of New Mexico and Utah (Henretta, Edwards, & Self, 2012). Douglas also introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1954.
They show this in the article How Did Sectionalism Lead to the Civil War? When it states. “In 1860, the Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln for the presidency. When Lincoln won — the first Republican to win the White House — Southerners reacted with panic. Despite Lincoln's stated commitment to halt slavery's expansion in the West, but maintain it where it already existed, Southerners believed he would ban slavery outright.
The Compromise of 1877 was an unwritten deal that settled the intensely disputed 1876 election. It resulted with the United States pulling the last of the troops from the south, ending the Reconstruction Era and giving the south power over their land. Both Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden had great political talent, but of course, they saw being president as something else in their own eye. With Hayes coming from the North and Tilden coming from the South, their goals were going to be pretty different. The Civil War ended not too many years before hand, so the election was going to be very rough.
Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, won the Election of 1860 with approximately forty percent of the popular vote and a majority of the electoral votes. Lincoln grasped the attention of the nation with his Cooper Union Speech which opposed the expansion of slavery but not slavery itself. Lincoln embraced a more popular free soil opposition to the expansion of slavery. This caused the Republican Party to become a supporter of free soil but not abolition. Soon after Lincoln was elected as the 16th President of the United States, South Carolina seceded from the Union.
For example, Lincoln stated “one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was ‘to form a more perfect Union.’ But if destruction of the Union by one or by a part only of the States be lawfully possible, the Union is ‘less’ perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity.” Lincoln explained if the Southern States would be given the right to secede from the Union, then it would make the Union imperfect which would go against the Constitution. The main idea of Lincoln’s address is to empower the states to remain in the Union, or to “form a more perfect Union.” On the other hand, the South believed they had the right to secede from the Union as explained through Jefferson Davis’s Inaugural Address “The Aims at the South” in February 1861 in Montgomery, Alabama.
He tries to appeal to the South’s perspective by agreeing with their argument that the North’s reluctance towards following the Fugitive Slave Act, however, he contrasts that appeal by disagreeing with their motive of secession. The fact that the speech already discusses secession 10 years before the first state secedes from the Union demonstrates that the South already doesn’t feel comfortable with the North and they
Our country is on the verge of disaster today. Provincial parties are seeking blood from one another. By being the kings of these radicals, Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Fremont do absolutely nothing but intensify the problem, which threatens to burst out into civil war. During my last serving as President, this very same argument over slavery loomed over us.
This essay will explore the reasons as to how and why secession occurred and whether slavery was the main
On the eve of the Civil War, the South was determined to protect what they considered their way of life. This way of life included their right to slaves, which they felt the North was threatening (OpenStax, 2016). The South generally felt that the North was attacking them, and this belief only strengthened after Lincoln’s election. The Northerners, specifically the Republican Northerners, were determined to stop the expansion of slavery. When the South seceded, Lincoln declared that they could not secede, and fought to bring them back to the Union (OpenStax, 2016).
Before the Missouri Compromise there was a lot of tension between the people who were pro-slavery and antislavery. It became more heated after the Missouri’s 1819 request for admission to the Union as a slave state, which threatened to balance between slave and free states. Congress created a two-part compromise, to create peace between the states. They did this by granting Missouri’s request which was admitted as a free state but also passed an amendment that drew an imaginary line across the former Louisiana Territory. This established a boundary between free and slave regions which remained the law of the land until it was nullified by the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
Constitution and altered it by explicitly protecting the institution of slavery. This peculiar institution was what made the Confederacy unique. Sectionalism over economic, social, political, and constitutional issues regarding slavery continued from Buchanan’s inauguration in 1857 until secession after Lincoln’s election in 1860. “The expansion of slavery into western territories provided the catalyst for the growing perceptions of northerners and southerners that they held different intentions of the republic’s future.” “In the South, loyalty to slavery and its required expansion became the hallmark of party politics as the region’s politicians—Whigs, Know-Nothing, and Democrat—competed to demonstrate their loyalty to southern rights.”