Civil War Dbq Essay

Originally, as a new nation emerging, the United States was focused on building and stabilizing itself in order to seem powerful to foreign countries. However, as time went on, the North and the South disagreed over various issues and were eventually divided. Many events arose which worsened the split between the North and South after the Antebellum Era, resulting in the South seceding from the Union. The reason why Southern states seceded from the Union in 1860 and 1861 was the controversy over slavery between the North and the South. One main event that contributed to the controversy over slavery and the South’s secession was Abraham Lincoln’s election. Abraham Lincoln first came into the limelight during the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

As mentioned before, the North did not support slavery and contained the Republican Party and free-soilers. Contrastly, the South supported slavery and heavily relied on it. This disagreement caused the South to secede from the Union. According to the Southern Democratic Party platform during the 1860 presidential campaign,“all citizens of the United States have an equal right to settle with their property in the Territory” (Document 1). During this time period, slaves were considered property, as this was written in the Constitution under the Fifth Amendment. Southerners believed they had a right to have slaves on their land because they technically owned them as property and going against the Fifth Amendment would be unconstitutional. A few cases, such as the Dred Scott case, tried to counter this statement. In the Dred Scott case, a man named Dred Scott, who lived in Missouri, was taken from his home and moved to Minnesota, which was a free state. He argued that since he was living in a free state, he should be free. However, Roger B. Taney, the Supreme Court Justice of this case, ruled that Congress never had the right to prohibit slavery in any territory and that “free territory” did not really exist. So, Dred Scott would not be considered free in any

The Southerners believed that this overpowering and hostility would lead to the destruction of the South, so they wanted to secede before any of that took place. According to Albert Gallatin Brown, a Mississippi politician, the North was “accumulating power and it meant to use that power to emancipate [the South’s] slaves” (Document 2). With the North having a large population and Lincoln being president of both the Union and the United States, the South believed that they would be overpowered and would have to give up slavery. Before Lincoln’s election, the North and South were already split because of controversy over slavery. When it was time for Republican Lincoln’s election, however, the North dominated the South because it had more territories and a larger population. According to Document 4, which are the results of the 1860 presidential election, Lincoln received 1,865,600 popular votes and 180 electoral votes, whereas Douglas received 1,382,700 popular votes and 12 electoral votes. Lincoln won because the North had a larger population than the South and made up the majority of his votes. As for Northern hostility toward the South, Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy believed that “The Election was not the cause [of secession]”, but “sectional hostility manifested in hostile legislation by states and raids”