Following Lincoln's death (?), Radical Republicans took control of Congress and attempted to create

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

Debates over which powers were rightly the states and rightly the federal governments were already tense and the question of whether slavery should or shouldn’t exist in the new territories of America, added on to the already strained relationship between the two sides. Document A describes this situation as a cup on the edge of the shelf, certain things almost pushing it over the edge such as the addition of new states being free or under a slavery economy. Many compromises were formed to try and keep states’ rights as well as keep power for the government. The south wanted to assert their authority over the federal government so they could abolish federal rights they didn’t support, this was

The ugly history of success does not end when slavery is outlawed in 1865. Racism was still very much alive in the South. Jim Crow laws were instated in an effort to halt the freedoms of Black Americans, until they were done away with. Skipping ahead to the 1960s,

As much as Reconstruction had initially tried to help the South, it was the sole goal of this movement to, “undo as much as possible of Reconstruction.” State facilities originally that were supposed to help everyone were closed down, and the gap between black and white expenditures on schooling increased. Due to the depression in the 1890’s this worsened the situation for black families trying to make a living in the South couldn’t keep up their farms or the places that their children would learn. “In 1900, no public high schools for blacks existed in the South. Black elementary schools, one observer reported, occupied buildings “as bad as stables””. New laws about segregation also affected blacks in more ways than just demoralization, it also showed what kind of jobs were considered good work for them. In the instance of segregation on railroads, “many blacks could be found in “whites only” railroad cars. But they entered as servants and nurses, not as paying customers entitled to equal treatment. The rise of lynching also affected the way blacks lived their lives, by controlling the way they vote, how they treated whites, and how they couldn’t rely on the justice system to address their grievances. An example of the reduced number of voters is best seen in Louisiana, where the number of voters dropped from 130, 000 to 1, 342, which is directly linked to the use of violence as a way to intimidate black voters. Blacks also had to be careful how they acted around white, since murder wasn’t a federal crime and was handled by the state, many blacks were lynched without fair trials and accused of crimes like raping white women, murder, and theft. A majority of the accused never when to trial. All in all blacks in the South were largely affected negatively as a result in policy changes, social factors, and widespread violence. This injustice carried on

At the end of the Civil War, America faced the difficult task of uniting not only two separated territories of the United States, but also two races long separated by racism and culture. Devastated and embittered by the damage of the war, the South had a long way to go in order to achieve true equality between the former slave owners and former slaves. The majority of the South remained set in racist behavior, finding post-Civil War legal loopholes to diminish African American rights (Tindall & Shi, 2010, pp. 757-758). Southerners continued to marginalize Blacks in their behavior toward ex-slaves and the later African American generation,

Just as Northerners saw flaws in the Constitution, Southerners viewed it not to be perfect as well. President James Buchanan, a northern man with southern sympathies clarified, “As sovereign states, they and they alone, are responsible before God and the world for the slavery existing among them” (Document G). However, In Doc B, an anonymous writer defends the state’s rights that the constitution should protect slavery where it exists. The union will fall apart unless these rights are protected.

America went through numerous changes through the Reconstruction Era.The north and south were now a united nation again after the south had seceded. During the time of reconstruction, many constitutional and social developments brought change to the country. Some of the Constitutional developments was the Emancipation Proclamation, Civil Rights bills, and some social developments that could lead to a revolution was the Freedmen’s Bureau, KKK, and others. Since the status of blacks in America was greatly altered and the power of government was increased greatly, in the time period of 1860-1877 mostly amounted in a revolution, but only to an extent.

As time passed the rapidly changing society in the nineteenth century, in 1820 the north and south began to have serious conflicting problems that were proved unfixable by compromise. During this time, the north underwent major social, economic, and industrial changes known as the Antebellum Period. While the south generally clung to king cotton and slavery and thus remained essentially the same. This arose a manifold of controversies with how issues such as tariffs, slavery, and land should be handled. Both the Union and the Confederacy tried to create compromises to resolve these problems, yet both sides were never completely satisfied no matter how hard they tried. This made it very close to impossible for them to completely put their

By the 1850s sectional tension had spread across the nation. The lack of a solution to the issue of slavery that would appease both proponents and opponents of the issue increased this tension. The Constitution was written as a document to bring the nation together but was beginning to tear it apart. The Constitution was vague in terms of addressing slavery within the United States, causing arguments made by both sides of the issue to further polarize the nation. The statement, “By the 1850s the Constitution, originally framed as an instrument of national unity, had become a source of sectional discord and tension and ultimately contributed to the failure of the union it had created.” The interpretations of the Constitution about the

The popular sovereignty used in New Mexico territories, the compromise of 1850 and the Kansas and Nebraska Acts were Victories of the south politically, however these acts were still seemed as "compromises" because both the north and the south were dissatisfied with these acts, that they could only be compromises but not victories. For the south the expansion of slavery was needed because the slavery was the foundation of southern society and economy, they had enjoyed less benefits from the fast developing northern industrial economy, if, without more lands and slaves moving to the new land, the expansion of production could not be achieved while their way of living could be challenged. For the northerners the process of industrial revolution went slowly in the south and with slavery the free labor could never come true. The Bleeding Kansas, Dred Scott Affair and John Brown created a sense that the movement of northern abolitionists had come to a climax, while the south itself, during the National Convention of Democratic Party, divided

The events that led to the time where compromise no longer seemed possible, starting the American Civil War, involved intense augmentation of sectionalism, dispute of states’ over federal rights, and the dispute of slavery. The North and the South’s differentiation in

The point, therefore, is that the North was “not in the best position to instruct the South, either by precedent and example, or by force of conviction, on the implementation of what eventually became one of the professed war aims of the Union cause – racial equality” (21).

The South killed the reconstruction with violence and threats. There is evidence of a former white soldier pleading with Congress to help solve the KKK issues in the

Abraham Lincoln spent most of his political career as a member of the Whig party endorsing policies that aided economic development, supported free soil and opposed the expansion of slavery. Lincoln was instrumental in creating the voice of the Republican Party and during that process his own views on slavery were shaped. He played the middle ground and therefore appealed to both former conservative northern Whigs, and radical Republicans. The Civil War proved to be a turning point in Lincoln’s view of slavery and the extent he would go to abolish it.

The Jim Crow Laws enhanced the institution of racism in The United States. Reconstruction was meant to rebuild the South from the destructive Civil War and help integrate African American’s into the southern lifestyle. Instead, the Jim Crow Laws segregated colored people from white people and encouraged the discrimination of colored people. Subject to the pervasive reign of terror by the Klu Klux Klan, stripped of their political and civil rights by white state legislatures and white judiciaries, and the denial of the protection of the forces of law and order -“Marooned in a vast sea of cruelty”- is one a phrase used to describe the predicament African Americans found themselves in when the Jim Crow Laws were implemented (Fireside, Harvey 2). Until the Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka (1954), the Federal Government did little to help the oppressed blacks in the south; it was the responsibility of the NAACP to better the quality of life for black people (Dray, Philip 215). President Franklin Roosevelt even refused to pass an anti-lynching law in the South. (Trotter, Joe 2)