Civil War Tension And Resolution

Tension and Resolution The years leading to the beginning of the American Civil War were filled with more tension than any other previous political conflict in America’s nineteenth century history. The break up of the Union began with the debates over slavery during the development of the United States Constitution. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise developed a boundary line between the North and the South at the 36° 30' parallel. All territories above the line applying for statehood prohibited the expansion of slavery while all territories below the line welcomed the practice of slavery. The compromise set an equal agenda for slave states and free states when being represented in Congress. In 1854, The Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri

Buchanan supported the view of popular sovereignty, where states could choose to vote on legalizing slavery in their respective state constitutions. When the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed in 1856, any territory preparing to enter the union as a state had to include whenever slavery was supported or disavowed. Buchanan promoted the law in his inaugural address, “Congress is neither ‘to legislate slavery into any Territory or State nor exclude it therefrom, but leave it to the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States’’’ (Buchanan “Inaugural Address”). Buchanan was ready to let comprise determine how slavery would continue to exist in the United States. The backlash of popular sovereignty took its toll in Kansas between pro-slavery supporters and anti-slavery supporters. Both sides were trying to apply for the statehood of Kansas with their respective constitutions and invading their opponents’. As a compromise could not seem to work, Buchanan requested, “the will of a majority of the people of any State or Territory on an important and exciting question like that of slavery in Kansas except by leaving it to a direct vote” (Buchanan “First Annual Message”). Buchanan, as a pro-slavery president, enacted this strategy to avoid a draw between the sides and give the pro-slavery

The events of John Brown’s raid at Harper's Ferry had pushed the south to secede from the union. Buchanan remarked, that the events “derive their chief importance from the apprehension that they are but symptoms of an incurable disease in the public mind, which may break out in still more dangerous outrages and terminate at last in an open war by the North to abolish slavery in the South” (Buchanan, “Third Annual Message”). Buchanan was predicting the actions of the North and South with the North prepared to stop slavery at all costs with the South attempting to preserve their rights to slavery. At last the Supreme Court would be involved with the question of slavery in the Case of Dred Scott. The court ruled in favor of the proslavery settlement but added on the fact that all slaves are property and that slavery could not be prohibited anywhere in the nation. Buchanan hoped the court’s decision would settle the slavery question at last, “I believe never will pass, any act to exclude slavery from these Territories; and certainly not by the Supreme Court, which has solemnly decided that slaves are property, and, like all other property, their owners have a right to take them into the common Territories and hold them there under the protection of the Constitution” (Buchanan, “Fourth Annual Message”). The slavery