Civil War

Abraham Lincoln once stated, “A House divided against itself cannot stand. I Believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the house to fall. But I do expect it will 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 Constitution 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 1800’s the Southern 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 to be property (Monk 208). Slavery was the South’s 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 Supreme 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 argument 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 place had it not been for the fact that slavery and its extension into new territories had become such a continuously debated issue (Monk 207). The Court took on Scott’s case with the goal of settling the issue once and for all. Unfortunately, the court was involving itself in a highly volatile political situation when they ruled 7-2 against Scott’s claim. Nevertheless, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s decision was the one on record with him holding the majority vote against Scott. On the basic issue of Scott’s freedom, the Court agreed with the lower courts’ determination that Scott was neither a citizen of the state or the U.S. nation, and therefore could not bring a suit before a court (“We the People” 119). The reaction to Taney’s ruling was predictable: The South celebrated, praising that the Constitutional guarantees of property (described in the 5th Amendment) were clearly defined once and for all. No governmental body had the authority to restrict the movement of slaves, who had been declared inviolable property by the highest court of the land (Irons 182). The North condemned the ruling, describing it as a politically motivated act by a Pro-Southern Supreme Court. The Court seemed to ignore that the Constitution also spoke of guarantees to freedom in the same sentence that it guaranteed property in the 5th Amendment (Ward 34). This lead to the even bigger argument on why the North and South had many different views on the issue of slavery. The Dred Scott decision was more than the Northerners could take, so they declared that they would not obey the court. This is the first instance of “Massive Resistance” to a Supreme Court decision up to that point (Oxford 454). After this decision in 1856 the North and South were practically at each other’s throats over the issue of slavery. The implied threat of the South using the Constitution and the Supreme Court to impose its repugnant system on the country angered and frightened many Northerners (Ward 30). Many Americans came to see that this irrepressible conflict between the Northern and Southern states would inevitably lead to and armed clash. After the Dred Scott Decision, the country could no longer maintain a North-South coalition. The South believed that they had no other decision but to secede.

Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, stated that “it is the right of governed and the right of the people to alter or abolish the government whenever they became destructive of the ends for which they were established.” (Ward 29). This was the justification that the Southerners gave for why they were to separate from the Union