Civil War
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Whether you prefer to call it the Civil War, the War Between The states, the war for states rights, the War of Northern Aggression, or whatever you deem appropriate, the result is the same – hundred of thousands of Americans, dressed in both gray and blue, paid the ultimate sacrifice fighting for a cause that they believed in.(globalsecurity)
When Abraham Lincoln, a known opponent of slavery, was elected president, the South Carolina legislature perceived a threat. Calling a state convention, the delegates voted to remove the state of South Carolina from the union known as the United States of America. The secession of South Carolina was followed by the secession of six more states – Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas – and the threat of secession by four more – Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina. These eleven states eventually formed the Confederate States of America.
The North faced a demanding and complex political problem, namely to reassert its authority over a vast territorial empire, far too extensive to be completely occupied or thoroughly controlled. Furthermore, President Lincoln recognized that Northern popular resolve might be limited and established rapid victory as a condition as well. Lincolns original policy of conciliation having failed, the president opted for the unconditional surrender of the South as the only acceptable aim. Lincolns search for a general who would devise a strategy to attain his aim ended with Grant in March 1864. (Sparknotes)
There are many causes for the war and most will be found at the foundation of our political fabric, in the fundamental law, in the Constitution itself, in the conflicting constructions, which it invented, and in the institution of slavery, which it recognized and was intended to protect. It is fair to say that if there had been no slavery there would have been no war, but there would have been no slavery if the Souths protests could have availed when it was first introduced. Then the Constitution was adopted and the Union formed, slavery existed in practically all the states; and it is claimed by the Southern people that its disappearance from the Northern and its development in the southern states is due to the climatic conditions and industrial exigencies rather than to the existence or absence of great moral ideas. ( A history of civil war)
Slavery was undoubtedly the immediate fomenting cause of the woeful American conflict. It was the great political factor around which the passions of the sections had long been gathered. But slavery was far from being the sole cause of the prolonged conflict. Neither its destruction on the one hand, nor its defense to the other, was the energizing force that held the contending armies to four years of bloody work. However there is a undeniable fact that the South could have saved slavery by simply laying down its arms and returning to the Union.
We must, therefore, look beyond the institution of slavery for the fundamental issues, which dominated and inspired all classes of the contending sections. William E. Gladstone believed that the government formed by our fathers was the noblest political fabric ever devised by the brain of man. This undoubtedly is true; and yet before these inspired builders were dead, controversy arose as to the nature and powers of their constitutional government. Indeed, in the very convention that framed the Constitution the clashing theories and bristling arguments of 1787 presaged the glistening bayonets of 1891. In the cabinet of the President, the contests between Hamilton and Jefferson, representatives of conflicting constitutional constructions, were so persistent and fierce as to disturb the harmony of executive councils and tax the patience of Washington. The disciples of each of these political prophets numbers in their respective ranks the greatest statesman and purest patriots. The followers of each continuously battled for these conflicting theories with a power and earnestness worthy of the founders of the Republic. Generation after generation, in Congress, on the Hastings, and though the press, these irreconcilable doctrines were urge by constitutional expounders, until their arguments became ingrained into the very fibre of the brain and conscience of the sections. The long war of words between the leaders waxed at last into a war of guns between their followers. (civilwarhome)
The South maintained with the depth of religious conviction that the Union formed under the Constitution was a Union of consent and not force; that these States had gained their independence, their freedom, and their sovereignty from the mother country, and had not surrendered these on entering the Union; that by the express terms of the Constitution all rights and powers not delegated were reserved to the States; and the South challenged the North to find one trace of authority in the Constitution for invading and coercing a sovereign State.
The North, on the other hand, maintained with the utmost confidence in the correctness of her position that the Union formed under the Constitution was intended to be perpetual; that sovereignty was a unit and could not be divided; that whether or not there was any express power granted in the Constitution for invading a State, the right of self-preservation was inherent in all governments; that the life of the Union was essential to the life of liberty. (Mr. Lincoln goes to war)
To the charge of the North that secession was rebellion and treason; the South replied that the epithets of rebel and traitor did not deter her from the assertion of her independence, since these same epithets had been familiar to ears of Washington and Hancock and Adams and Light Horse Harry Lee. In vindication of her right to secede, she appealed to the essential doctrine, ” the right to govern rests on the consent of the governed,” and to the right of independent action as among those reserved by the States. The South appealed to the acts and opinions of the Fathers and to the report of the Hartford Convention of New England States asserting the power of each State to decide as to the remedy for infraction of its rights; to the petitions presented and positions assumed by ex – President John Quincy Adams; to the declaration of the 8th of January assemblage in Ohio indicating that 200,000 Democrats in that State alone were ready to stand guard on the banks of the border river and resist invasion of Southern territory; and to the repeated declarations of Horace Greeley and the admission of President Lincoln himself that there was difficulty on the question of force, since ours ought to be a fraternal Government. (sparknotes)
In answer to all these points, the North also cited the acts and opinions of the same Fathers, and urged that the purpose