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State's Rights Issue In 1860

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In 1860, the Southern slave states elected to secede from the United States of America and form the Confederate States of America. The issues that resulted in the secession of the south included disagreements over tariffs and state rights, but the greatest issue was over slavery, which was legal and a large part of culture and economy in the South but had been slowly prohibited by states in the North. As the United States expanded into the West with new territories, fierce debates started over whether or not slavery would be legal in those expanded territories. People in the South feared that not allowing slavery in these new states would eventually cause slavery to be outlawed in all of America. Southerners were also bitter about how Southern …show more content…

State's rights involved the decreasing power of the states and the rights not granted the federal government being taken over. The debate over which powers rightly belonged to the states and which to the Federal Government became fierce in the 1820s and 1830s, fueled by the issue of whether slavery would be allowed in the newly formed territories as the nation expanded to the west. The Missouri Compromise in 1820 and Wilmot Proviso in 1846 tried to solve the problem, the Compromise established lands west of the Mississippi and as slave states and north of the line as free, while the Wilmot Proviso was a proposed law designed to eliminate slavery within the land acquired from the Mexican War. David Wilmot appealed for Free Soil, asking “not that slavery be abolished. I demand that this government preserve the integrity of free territory against the aggressions of slavery — against its wrongful usurpations.” Abolitionist groups vaulted up in the North, causing people in the South to feel that their way of life and profit was under attack. They began to argue that slavery was not only necessary, but in fact, it was a positive good. The issue not only of slavery, but of the rights of the states among the North and the South also drove them away from certain issues such as national policy. Their interests in economy and political issues varied so differently that the positions they took in politics had as much to do about slavery as it did with their political interests. When state's rights arguments were proposed in the late 1840's in support of separation of the states, Congress responded with the Compromise of

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