DBQ Essay: The First Secession

During the Mid 1800’s marked a crucial period for our country. It will have a big effect on the development of our country. Throughout this time, our country was split, split into two sections, the North and the South. The Civil war was a war fought against the North and the South, the Union and the Confederates, from 1861-1865.

There were many important Compromises between the years of 1820 and 1860, some that worked completely and some that didn’t. In the early nineteenth century, people were good at compromising and making things work for everyone. How long did perfect compromising actually last? Slavery began to split the nation apart, causing compromising to become hard to do.

Since colonial times the United States had been divided into two completely different parts. The Northern states were mostly free states who believed slavery should be put to end. On the other hand, the Southernern states were slaves states, meaning they were pro-slavery. Therefore, their two ideas about slavery clashed with one another causing great deal of problems such as battles, fights, and debates between the North and South. These disagreements eventually lead to the Southern states seceding from the Union.

At the time of Lincoln's inauguration in 1861, seven states had seceded from the Union. Lincoln’s anti-slavery platform made him extremely unpopular with Southerners. He won the presidential election without the support of a single Southern state. Lincoln felt it was his sacred duty as President to preserve the Union. His first inaugural address was an appeal to the rebellious states to rejoin the nation.

The American Civil War changed Americans and their ideals about freedom in many ways. Northern and Southern United states began to have simmering tensions for the states’ rights versus federal authority, plus westward expansion, and slavery had huge effects on the states. An election which made anti-slavery Republican Abraham Lincoln the president of the United States of America in 1860, caused seven of the southern states to concede from the Union to make The Confederate States Of America soon after four more joined afterwards. It changed Americans in many ways as neighbors fought each other through the 4 gruesome years of the war. Conflict between the sides were like fights between brother and brother instead with many deaths.

South Carolina 1860 South Carolina had long been a catalyst for, and a symbol of, Southern dreams of a bold new future and an independent new confederacy as well as Northern nightmares of the American experiment gone awry. Most white South Carolinians believed that their economic prosperity, political interest, and social stability were inextricable tied to state rights, the organization of subjugation, and the manor framework as it had advanced subsequent to the frontier period. It is a commonplace of American history that South Carolina leaders did not always, in the first decades of the Union, defend the extreme state rights doctrines which John C. Calhoun so ably expounded later in the antebellum period. In the convention of 1787 South

In February 1861, a new government was on the horizon in the United States, known as the Confederate States of America. Composed of seven states from the South, this new government looked to separate from a union that they felt was tipping in power towards those who wanted to threaten the rights of the South, especially slavery. Similarly, in early 1775, colonists were preparing for revolution against a power that they felt oppressed their rights and wanted to take away their liberties. However, the Civil War was a not a complete representation of a second American Revolution. The Civil War was more than an unsatisfied party rebelling against a larger power, but a clash between two vastly different ways of life.

The Road to the Civil War The sectional crisis began in the early 1850s. Lincoln’s House Divided speech (Document A) and Mississippi’s declaration of secession letter (Document B) are a cause and effect sequence of the antislavery movement. The wide range of opinions on slavery was a large problem in the states. Sectional controversy grew as opinionated abolitionist pushed their way through.

South Carolina was the first to withdraw from the Union. The state of South Carolina did not want to be part of nation that had no control. Then other southern states such as, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, and Louisiana left the Union. As a result they established the Confederate States of America, which was an independent southern slave republic. Lower and South and Upper South had to go to war to decide whether what side to pick.

Alexander Stephens’ Cornerstone Speech in Savannah is unquestionably the most famous speech associated with the Confederacy. Stephens was speaking extemporaneously and later complained that his views had been distorted and taken out of context by Northern abolitionists. We have already seen that Alexander Stephens gave another version of the Cornerstone Speech a month later at the Virginia Convention. The fundamental racialist worldview articulated in both speeches is more or less the same: The status of the African negro in the Southern states was “the immediate cause” of secession. It was the “occasion” or “incident” of secession, which is to say, the spark that ignited the blaze.

Over time people have fought for many reasons. Their beliefs helped shaping the outcome of their battles. In America’s history, there has been many wars. We got our independence by fighting in the Revolutionary War. In the War of 1812, we fought off the British again.