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The Fluidity of the American Civil War

 

From the anti-slavery perspective, the issue was primarily about whether the system of slavery was an anachronistic evil that was incompatible with Republicanism in the United States. The strategy of the anti-slavery forces was containment - to stop the expansion and thus put slavery on a path to gradual extinction. The slave-holding interests in the South denounced this strategy as infringing upon their Constitutional rights. Southern whites believed that the emancipation of slaves would destroy the South's economy because of the alleged laziness of blacks under free labor.
             Slavery was illegal in the North. It was fading in the border states and Southern cities but was expanding in the highly profitable cotton districts of the South and Southwest. Subsequent writers on the American Civil War looked to several factors explaining the geographic divide, including sectionalism, protectionism, and state's rights.
             Sectionalism .
             Sectionalism refers to the different economies, social structure, customs and political values of the North and South. Pamphleteers North and South rarely mentioned the tariff, and when some did, for instance, Matthew Fontaine Maury and John Lothrop Motley, they were writing for a foreign audience.
             States rights .
             The South argued that each state had the right to secede–leave the Union–at any time, that the Constitution was a "compact" or agreement among the states. Northerners rejected that notion as opposed to the will of the Founding Fathers who said they were setting up a perpetual union.
             Senator Stephen A. Douglas proclaimed the doctrine of territorial or "popular" sovereignty – which declared that the settlers in a territory had the same rights as states in the Union to establish or disestablish slavery as a purely local matter. The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 legislated this doctrine. In Kansas Territory, years of pro and anti-slavery violence and political conflict erupted; the Congressional House of Representatives voted to admit Kansas as a free state in early 1860, but its admission in the Senate was delayed until January 1861, after the 1860 elections when Southern senators began to leave.


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