Civil War Dbq Essay

Venturing into the woods, smoke everywhere, bombs flying over your heads, people around you being shot down one by another. This was just the beginning of the Civil War, the harshest war in American history, especially for the Texans. It all started because Abraham Lincoln was elected president, and didn’t want slaves. But, why did the Texans fight? They wanted to keep slavery, protect states’ rights, and overall, for the love of their state, Texas. One reason they fought is that Texas, and some other southern states, wanted to keep slavery. They felt it was necessary and needed in their economy. They without having their slaves would be like us without cars. They feel and seem so needed, we wouldn’t know what to do with our lives. There were more than about 182,000 slaves in Texas at the time, that’s 30% of Texas (Doc A). Also, people spent a lot of money on slaves, $1,200 for one healthy male slave, versus $6 for an anchor of land!(Doc A) And back then that would be triple the amount, giving up slaves would be like giving up thousands of dollars. Another reason is that people didn’t want to work hundreds of anchors of land. It would take months to farm all of that alone.

Before Abraham Lincoln was elected president, states could vote on whether or not they wanted slavery. Texas took this as power over the free slave states, but Abraham Lincoln ruined it all, “The Union of these States is perpetual….No state upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union.”(Doc C) What he’s saying is that no matter what you do you will never overrun the Union’s power, and that he doesn’t like the idea of states rights that