Abolition Movement Research Paper

South Carolina was the first state to secede in December of 1860 with its government issuing a document explaining why. South Carolina legislature enacted an "ordinance" that "the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of 'The United States of America,' is hereby dissolved. Issues included States Rights and disagreements over tariffs but the greatest divide was on the issue of slavery, which was legal in the South but had gradually been banned by states north of the Mason-Dixon line. As the North and the South became more and more different, their goals and desires also separated By the 1840s and 1850s, North and South had each evolved extreme positions that had as much to do with serving their own political interests as with the morality of slavery. What concerned Southerners most about Lincoln’s …show more content…
The institution was not just a necessary evil: it was a positive good, a practical and moral necessity. Controlling the slave population was a matter of concern for all Whites, whether they owned slaves or not. The Abolition Movement grew in power and prominence. The slave holding in the South increasingly felt its interests were threatened, particularly since slavery had been prohibited in much of the new territory that had been added west of the Mississippi River. The arguments for the right of secession are indisputable. The constitutional right based on the Compact Theory, and the revolutionary right based on the idea that a free people have the right to change their government anytime they see fit, in which they did. Two phases of antislavery agitation occurred in the United States during the nineteenth century, one pacific and intended to persuade the South that slavery should be given up, the other seeking to induce the North to use her influence in congress to wipe out what was considered a blot on American