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The College Board Advanced Placement Examination 1987 UNITED STATES HISTORY Section II - Part A (Suggested writing time - 45 minutes) Percent of Section II score - 45 Directions: The following question requires you to construct a coherent essay that integrates your interpretation of Documents A-1 and your knowledge of the period referred to in the question. In your essay, you should strive to support your assertions both by citing key pieces of evidence from the documents and by drawing on your knowledge of the period. 1. "By the 1850's 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." …show more content…

. . All for which the slave States have ever contended, is to be let alone and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way: As sovereign States, they, and they alone, are responsible before God and the world for the slavery existing among them. . . . "The Southern States, standing on the basis of the Constitution, have a right to demand this act of justice from the States of the North. Should it be refused, then the Constitution, to which all the States are parties, will have been willfully violated by one portion of them in a provision essential to the domestic security and happiness of the remainder. In that event the injured States, after having first used all peaceful and constitutional means to obtain redress, would be justified in revolutionary resistance to the Government of the Union. . . . "The question fairly stated is, Has the Constitution delegated to Congress the power to coerce a State into submission which is attempting to withdraw or has actually withdrawn from the Confederacy? If answered in the affirmative, it must be on the principle that the power has been conferred upon Congress to declare and to make war against a State. After much serious reflection I have arrived at the conclusion that no such power has been delegated to

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