Civil War Dbq

Growing tension between the North and South of the newly formed, America, started due to their drastically different views on slavery. While the North believed owing another man and forcing him to do one’s labor is unconstitutional, the South strongly disagreed. After many compromises, acts of violence, and political differences, the North and South decided they could not stay unified. The fundamental differences between the North and the South’s beliefs on slavery led to overwhelming tensions that ultimately sparked the civil war. America started to expand west in the 1840’s in both land and population: going from 890,000 to 3,000,000 miles of land and from 5.3 million to 23 million people. At this time, the South’s political importance

Unfortunately, Northern free black people were sometimes taken from their community and shipped to the South to be sold into slavery. The Northerners saw a strong denial of personal rights to these escaped slaves, so they passed personal liberty laws between 1842 and 1850 stating that they would not cooperate with the federal recapture efforts. These personal liberty laws angered Southerners because they believed it was illegal infringement of their property, slaves. As part of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive slave law was passed by Congress when the federal government started to support slave owners. It gave power to slave owners to capture escaped slaves, and imposed federal penalties on citizens who protected or helped fugitives. In a newspaper called the Anti-slavery Almanac, a story of a black man being kidnapped was posted. It stated that when, “offered for sale in Louisiana, he so clearly stated the facts that a slaveholding court declared him FREE-- thus giving a withering rebuke to Northern servility” (A Northern Freeman) . This posting clearly indicates that the North did not believe in the preposterous rules being placed upon them by the

He did this because he wanted to expand the construction of the transcontinental railroad. The issue with this proposition was that it left the question of slavery open to the residents. This strained the major political parties, seeing as Whigs, one of the political parties much like Democrats, were split in the North and South. Northern Whigs were against the idea, and Southerner Whigs were for it. This act, in essence, repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by stating that, “all part of the territory of the United States included within the following limits… beginning at a point in the missouri River where the fortieth parallel of north latitude crosses the same…”, when the Missouri Compromise stated that slavery was not allowed north of the 36-30 latitude line (A Century). The act was extremely controversial, and anti-Nebraska rallies broke out all over. This started to spark the thought that abolition and staying together as a country would not work. In a letter from one Northerner to another, J. Locke Hardeman says just that as he writes, “In conclusion, I would respectfully ask if Kansas be settled by abolitionists, can missouri remain a slave state?. . . I know that abolition & union can not stand together ” (J. Locke). Due to this doubt of unification, John Brown, an antislavery man,