Civil War Dbq

At the turn of 1861, the Northern and Southern states in the U.S had their own foundations, morals and concerns on certain issues which contributed to the American Civil War from 1861 – 1865. The clash was more than a battle between two armies, it was a war waged between two societies. A major factor to the belief that the North and South were unable to coexist as a single nation was the emergence of sectionalism where the South depended on slavery to fuel their economy. Another dichotomous line that confirmed the two sides of the U.S as completely inconsistent with one another, was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 which resulted in the authorisation of White Americans to re-capture slaves who previously fled their oppressed position. The Kansas-Nebraska

However, the opposing act that was aimed to counter the ‘Fugitive Slave Act’ was the enactment of ‘Personal Liberty Laws.’ The North’s immediate gesture in compromising the ‘Personal Liberty Laws’ is a reflection of their evident and distinct values, as opposed to the South. These laws variously gave fugitives the rights of testimony, trial by jury, or they imposed criminal penalties for kidnapping.Therefore, antislavery officials could be held accountable for their actions and some of these laws could also be used to inhibit the capture of fugitives. Politician Charles Colcock Jones Jr said, ‘in this country have arisen two races’ (referring to northerners and southerners). They have been ‘so entirely separated…by morals…by estimates so totally opposite to all the constitutes honor, truth, and manliness, that they cannot longer exist under the same government.’ These contradicting views only contributes to the fact that their ability to coexist with each other was decreasing and Lincoln claimed himself that ‘this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free.’ The American Civil War was inevitable because the exclusive ideologies they held was each on its own, at two completely different ends of a

Implemented in 1854, this revoked the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which forbade slavery in the North. Even though Kansas would not be considered as a Northern state, it became a place of bloodshed as pro- and anti-slavery aspects expanded into the territory, strengthening the rising tension that was already present between the two parties. Pieter Geyl confirms that the North and South were ‘divided by a moral issue of the first magnitude,’ with one party ‘detesting slavery and, the other glorifying it as the basis of its social system.’ ‘Bleeding Kansas’ was an important component in understanding that the different ideologies of slavery between the people of Kansas at this time, resulted in their inability to compensate personal values for communal peace. As this act was aimed to save the North, to unify rather than divide, the Kansas-Nebraska Act resulted in the opposing contention. Reporter William Russell from the London Times had additionally claimed that the ‘tone’ and ‘speech’ of Southerners when alluding to people from the North were said in spite and hostility. In this Antebellum society, the simple introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska act, even though the Missouri Compromise was already in place, suggests that the event of ‘Bleeding Kansas’ could have been