Civil War Essay -- American History Civil War

Abraham Lincoln once stated, A House divided against itself cannot stand. I Believe this organization cannot endure, permanently half(a) slave and half free. I do not expect the house to fall. But I do expect it go away cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. More than anything else, differing interpretations about the Civil War drove the debate over the meaning of the report and of the Union.These were, of course, not new issues. Indeed, as Professor Joseph Ellis has noted in Founding Brothers the Revolutionary Generation both had been on the minds of the delegates to Philadelphia in 1787. And, significantly, they were considered so controversial that neither the word slavery nor the word nation appeared in the Constitution. In the late 1800s the southmostern states began to slowly secede from the Union on grounds that the federal government was limiting their rights, such as the right to own and regulate slaves, which were at that time considered t o be property (Monk 208). Slavery was the Souths main reason for secession, among other things. The South also, at that time, chose to remain an agricultural region therefore, it had strong reasons for seeing that slavery, as an institution, continued without limits or interference. At the same time that all of this angst was going on, the autocratic Court was being appointed a case that would add even more fuel to the already raging fire. The Dred Scott Decision of 1856 gave yet another arguing to this long debate about the issue of slavery between the North and the South. The case itself would not have reached the Supreme Court in the first attitude had it not been for the fact that slavery and its extension into new territories had become such a continu... ...from the beginning. In contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution, the Union of these states is perpetual, or pure(a) (Lincolns Inaugural Address). Abraham Lincoln stated in his Inaugural Address of 1860 tha t, Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to conjecture that no proper government ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination (Lincolns Inaugural Address). I agree with Lincolns hypothesis because if the framers created the Constitution with provisions for its own termination, then they would have implied that there would need to be necessary cause for such an action. No Union would create a constitution implying temporary unity (Ward 34). Lincolns words and theory of a perpetual union explains the fundamental statement no state has the right to secede from the Union.