Compare And Contrast The North And South In The Election Of 1860

America’s transformation into the country we live in today has been formed through numerous events during its short history but the event that will split the United States into North versus South is truly one of the most defining events in American history. Through numerous events leading up to the start of the Civil War, I will attempt to show how the United States was destined for conflict and that the Civil War was inevitable. The first way I will show how the war could not be avoided will deal with the issue of slavery. Slavery should be the first mentioned because many conflicts within the United States leading up to the Civil War and the division of the United States dealt with slavery. The Missouri Compromise should also be talked

The secession of South Carolina on December 20, 1860, by a vote of 169-0 was a response to the election of Abraham Lincoln of 1860. Lincoln perceived as an abolitionist wanted to contain slavery rather than ending it. The majority party above the Mason-Dixon line were Republicans and below were primarily Democrats and Republicans were viewed as abolitionists. The election of a Republican threatened the South’s status quo. The primary catalyst for secession was based on slavery. Different social cultures and political beliefs developed due to the South’s intimate and reliant relationship on slavery. Southern whites feared the end of slavery and this paranoia was shared among plantation slave owners and white Yeoman farmers. Southern whites felt that the North were threatening the supposed tranquility of the South. The South’s agrarian economy, honor, and independence were believed to be in danger. Slavery was intertwined with the South’s social, cultural, and economic makeup. As a result of slavery, the South developed a paternalistic culture and racial ideology of white supremacy. The perceived notion that the North was influencing it’s political and social beliefs on the South lead them to believe that secession was the only act of self-preservation. The growing differences between the South and North made it difficult to negotiate. This fear was exaggerated and accelerated the South’s eventual implosion. The South believed that without slavery it would self-destruct and

According to the Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, "[...] all men are created equal, [and] they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." One would then expect that every man, would be entitled to their freedom, and it was true, for all white men. African-Americans, however, faced a very different reality. They were still forced into slavery, they were deprived of those rights that all men were meant to have. While the north states opposed slavery, it was permitted in the south, and as the slavery issue raged on, one man would stand to fight for his freedom. His case, would go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court's decision would

From 1861 to 1865, the United States of America was fighting itself. The northern part of the United States, known as the Union or simply the North, was trying to end slavery in the southern part of the United States. The South seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America. The North consisted of Maine, New York, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, California, Nevada, and Oregon. The South consisted of Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. The North wanted slavery to be abolished, but the South needed slaves for their economy; the conflict started war. The North and the South were both prepared for war.

More than any other event, the American Civil War went far in defining a United States that had been imperfectly and incompletely shaped by its first 70 years. For seven decades, the presence of slavery in a republic founded on principles of human freedom increasingly confused the political system and unraveled the social fabric. (Heidler, David S. and Jeanne T. Heidler. (2015)). Although slavery in the South had given rise to antislavery movements in the North as early as the American Revolution, a fresh vigor characterized the abolition movement in the 1830s. Arguments over the western territories clouded the country into a series of disruptive crises. Each was settled with an unsatisfying compromise that left most Southerners feeling materially cheated and many Northerners morally embarrassed. (Heidler, David S. and Jeanne T. Heidler. (2015)). Efforts to organize the Midwest region called the Nebraska Territory in 1854, led to the ill-conceived Kansas-Nebraska Act. It was yet another attempt designed to secure Southern support for the organization of what by prior agreement would have been a free territory. Kansas and Nebraska were created from the region under the principal of popular sovereignty, which was to say that each territory would decide for itself whether to admit or prohibit slavery. (Heidler, David S. and Jeanne T. Heidler. (2015)). That plan

Prior to Civil War, distinct Northern and Southern cultures had been established; The free North occupied the commercial industry, while the slavery-based South undertook an agricultural occupation. The South and the North began to fight over right and wrong. The major issue was regarding slavery, as the South wanted to preserve slavery while, the North wanted to get rid of it. These conflicts rose into sectional antagonism and eventually put the United States and President Lincoln in a loophole. During the Civil War however, Lincoln made some extremely controversial decisions, that resulted in a reduction of the sectional antagonism present, and the United States became truly “one nation.”

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”1 These words, spoken by Abraham Lincoln, foreshadowed the war that became the bloodiest in all of the United State's history. The Civil War was a brutal conflict between the North and South; brother against brother. With slavery as the root cause, Southern states had seceded from the Union and were fighting for their independence. They became the Confederate States of America (CSA) and were a force to be reckoned with. The Union, however, put up a fierce struggle to preserve the country. If the Civil War was to be a war of attrition, the North had the upper hand because of its large population, industrialization, raw materials, railroad mileage, and navy. But if the war was short lived, the

Even after wisely gaining victory over the British during the revolutionary war, problems for America did not stop, the biggest issue of rising sectionalism was yet to be solved. This time the conflict was not with any foreign power, but it was between the northern and southern American states. David Donald, the editor of the book titled, “Why the North Won the Civil War” attempts to cautiously scrutinize the reasons behind the outcome of the civil war by inspecting major advantages and disadvantages of the confederate states which prevented their victory. In my opinion, Donald seems to argue that the biggest reasons behind the failure of the confederate states were not a shortage of resources, but the absence of economic unity, weak military leadership, European neutrality, surplus of democracy, and numerous partitions within the political parties. The five essays written by various expertise and compiled by Donald to provide in-depth information on major factors involved in the Civil War are impeccable for answering the question in focus, why the North won the Civil War?

In the later half of nineteenth century America, the new nation’s original ability to resolve conflict through means of peaceful compromise had vanished. Various spans of conflict such as Westward Expansion, the Market Revolution, Sectionalism, Mexican American War, the succession of the southern states and ultimately the failure of the Compromise of 1850 that made compromise between the North and the South unattainable. It was the uncompromising differences amongst the free and slave states over the power of the national government that created a divide that would result in divisional violence. From the industrialized North, the agricultural South, Jackson’s Presidency to Lincoln’s and the rise in America 's involvement in politics that followed, slavery was merely one pawn on the board during America’s transforming years that would later reveal itself to have been the vehicle for the Civil War.

In the early years of the 19th century, slavery was more than ever turning into a sectional concern, such that the nation had essentially become divided along regional lines. Based on economic or moral reasoning, people of the Northern states were increasingly in support of opposition to slavery, all the while Southerners became united to defend the institution of slavery. Brought on by profound changes including regional differences in the pattern of slavery in the upper and lower South, as well as the movement of abolitionism in the North, slavery in America had transformed from an issue of politics into a moral campaign during the period of 1815-1860, ultimately polarizing the North and the South to the point in which threats of a Southern disunion would mark the beginning of the Civil War in 1861 (Goldfield et. al, The American Journey, p. 281).

The Declaration of Independence (1776), written by only educated white men – Thomas Jefferson (Southern Colony), Benjamin Franklin (Middle Colony), and John Adams (Northern Colony) - established the basic rights that citizens were entitled to in a free country. However, this document contradicted the Constitution’s claim that all men were created equal, particularly in racial and gender identifiers such as slaves, Native Americans, and women. Slaves were essential in the economic development of the South. Most southerners considered slaves as property, only three-fifths of a man, and as a result, equality for

Do you ever wonder what could make a nation split into two? On December 20, 1860, South Carolina was the first of eleven states to secede. In the years before that, the North and South of the United States were full of tension. They were arguing about one of the biggest controversies the nation had faced. The issue of slavery. This issue was the primary cause of one of the bloodiest wars America has ever fought; the Civil War. Historians have argued over the reasons that caused America to fight against itself. Slavery was one of the biggest, but it wasn’t all that led to the South seceding from the Union.

The main cause of the American Civil War was a discrepancy in the institution of slavery. People in the North had been deliberating over the Constitutionality and morality of slavery for years, and they had finally decided that slavery was immoral and should be terminated. Conversely, Southerners argued that their entire way of life revolved around the institution of slavery. Southerners viewed African Americans as lesser being and did not believe that all the rights guaranteed in the Constitution applied to them. These disagreements also influenced how the United States would continue its westward expansion. Anti-slavery Northerners advocated for new states to be “free states” while Southerners wanted the institution of slavery to spread into the newly forming states.

This soon turned into a state’s rights issue, as new states were created during the 19th century. Would these new states be slave or free? Abraham Lincoln worked hard to abolish slavery, and after the Civil War ended, it seemed as though America was finally living up to it’s founding document. However, a series of laws known as the “Jim Crow Laws” were subsequently passed in Southern states, which essentially provided a legal justification for racism. Under the phrase “separate but equal”, America became a divided country; blacks could be free and contribute to society, but they had to remain separate in everything they did. Separate schools, separate sports leagues, separate washrooms, and separate seats on the bus were commonplace. Was this really equality for all men? A man named Martin Luther King Jr. certainly did not think so. His powerful words and peaceful nature made him a key leader in the Civil Rights Movement, the third important event which “broke the pattern” in world history. During his famous speech at the Washington Mall, King proclaimed, “one hundred years later, the Negro still is

There was an idea in the northern United States that African Americans have inherent rights and that whites do not have the right to own slaves. This is illustrated in how the northern population voted in the 1960 election. Lincoln was not on the ballot in the southern states meaning that the north singlehandedly voted Lincoln, a republican, into office. For the Southerners, the idea of liberty was the ability to do as they chose without interference from the government. This is evident when Lincoln was elected. A few days after the outcome of the 1860 election southern states started to secede.