History 111- Causes Of The Civil War Causes of the Civil War Although some historians feel that the Civil War was a result of political blunders and that the issue of slavery did not cause the conflict, they ignore the two main causes. The expansion of slavery, and its entrance into the political scene.
The North didn’t care about slavery as long as it stayed in the South. South Carolina seceded, because Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, was voted into office. The Republican party threatened the South’s expansion and so Southerners felt that they had no other choice. The United States was divided into three groups by the time the Civil War began: those who believed in the complete abolition of slavery, those who were against the expansion of slavery, and those who were pro slavery. The Republican party was formed in opposition to southern expansion.
Their views were Free Soil, Free Men and Free Labor. The Republicans were anti-South but they were in not abolitionists. They believed that slavery was a flawed system that made the south ineffective and because the North’s free labor system was superior it must be guarded from southerners. When the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, the South felt threatened, and because expansion was vital to the survival of slavery they also felt their way of life was being threatened. Because slavery was such an important part of Southern society, the South felt that they could not survive without it. That’s why they were not willing to compromise with the north.
To own slaves was a sign of wealth and social prestige and poor farmers who could not afford slaves had a goal to work for. In the election of 1860 you can see that Lincoln only secured 4% of the popular vote in the South, only winning in the upper 5 states, where in the north he received 54% of the popular vote. This shoes how united the South was in their dislike for Lincoln. If the South had been more divided they might have been more willing to compromise. The central cause of conflict between North and South was slavery, but it was only in it’s expansion that it became a reason for war. The entrance of slavery into politics made it into a public issue, and once the issue became public the conflict had to be solved.
From the first years in American history, we have drank. Records of the first Europeans on America’s mainland tell about the colonists’ great thirste after their original supplies of European-made alcohol ran out. The settlers made their own wine. Eve Alcohol was imported from all over the world.
Innovative colonists made alcohol from almost anything. One song from the 1700’s went like this: If barley be wanting to make into malt, We must be content and think it no fault, For we can make liquor to sweeten our lips Of pumpkins, and parsnips, and walnut-tree chips. Not everyone approved of drinking. Many Protestant groups, including the Methodists and Lutherans had strong antidrink traditions based upon religious teachings. Prohibition was first tried in America to protect colonial settlers from the attacks of I The earliest reformers called for moderation, not total abstinence, but as their movement gained strength it demanded a complete prohibition of all beer, wine, and liquor.
The first temperance legislation was passed in Massachusetts in 1838. Called the Many people in this era were beginning to be categorized as either drys or wets. Drys were against alcohol and wets were for it. Even with the increasing number of Drys in office, the liquor trade was one of the nation’s biggest industries in the lat Saloons were called the Devil’s Headquarters on earth by some.
Supporting the Dry cause were such enigmatic speakers such as Billy Sunday who said: The saloon is the sum of all villainies. It is worse than war, worse than pestilence, worse than famine. It is the crime of crimes. It is the mother of sins. It is the appalling source of miseries, pauperism and crime.
With all of this prohibition propaganda, the Wets were having a hard time maintaining the upper hand. Large gifts of cash came for the Dry cause from rich industrialists such as Henry Ford. The Drys saw the prize and sought it with a new fervor. Within one year and eight days of being proposed, 36 states were backing the Eighteenth Amendment.
Prohibition went into effect at midnight on Saturday, January 17, 1920. This new legislation out Under the Volstead Act, 1,500 poorly trained people were assigned to enforce Prohibition. They were very ineffective. One way to get alcohol was to make it yourself. Many people hid stills wherever they could.
Most people enjoyed the danger of the aut As an inadvertent result of the Prohibition Amendment was a loss of jobs. Some saloon owners closed down and opened speakeasies. Speakeasies were illegal nightclubs which sold liquor. Some beer producers continued to produce beer.
They accomplished t Most of the illegal liquor came from other countries. Canada imported huge amounts of liquor which was then smuggled into the United States. Many smugglers acquired alcohol overseas, and then brought it back to the United States. They’d wait until nigh The illegal liquor trade was very appealing to the gangsters of the time. At first, the gangsters were welcomed because they brought alcohol. Soon, however, the public learned better.
In Detroit, school children weren’t allowed outside at recess becaus Americans were intrigued by this. Many Americans were captivated by what was happening to America and reflected their feeling is the arts. Underworld, by Ben Hecht, was one of the first popular gangster movies. The American public loved these action-pa Americans grew anxious and more adventuresome.
They dared to bend the rules more and more. With speakeasies, the harder to was to gain access too, the more people wanted to get in. These speakeasies changed the nation. Here, people could drink and be On top for the rampant disregard for the law by civilians, many of the law enforcers were corrupt. Many crime lords had the public officials on their payroll.
Occasionally, as in the case of Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma in 1927, the officials actually Then there were the good guys, those Federal agents who upheld the Prohibition laws to the fullest. Two of them were Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith, the self proclaimed masters of a thousand disguises. They would put on disguises and go into speakeasies President Hoover took administering the Volstead Act very seriously. Total enforcement, however, never came about.
The problem was in the federal government. It placed all enforcement responsibilities on the city and state government. The enforcement as long as it wasn’t sold in saloons or taverns. No compromise could be reached. Many Drys hoped that the passing of the 19th amendment allowing women to vote could prevent the repeal of the 18th Amendment. However, many women’s groups such as the WCTU g The presidential elections of 1932 played a big part in the repeal.
Hoover, being blamed for the Depression, lost to Roosevelt. Many Wet candidate won office that year as well. After being admitted to the House and Senate, the 21st Amendment was quickl One of Prohibition’s lasting legacies was organized crime. The vast amount of funds that the gangsters now had allowed them to gain control of prostitution, gambling, drug dealing, as well as other illegal activities.
Prohibition has become a modern con Bibliography Coffey, Thomas M. The Long Thirst. New York: WW Norton and Co., 1975 Dumenil, Lynn. Modern Temper.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1995 Hintz, Martin. Farewell, John Barleycorn. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 1996 Karl, Barry D., The Uneasy State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Kerr, K.
Austin, Organized For Prohibition. London: Yale University Press, 1985 Lee, Henry, How Dry We Were: Prohibition Revisited. New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1963 Organized Crime . Compton’s Interactive Encyclopedia 1996 SoftKey International Inc. and its licensors.
Parrish, Michael E., Anxious Decades. New York: WW Norton and Co., 1992. Prohibition. Compton’s Interactive Encyclopedia 1996 SoftKey International Inc. and its licensors. Severn, Bill.
The End of the Roaring Twenties: Prohibition and Repeal. New York: Julian Messner, 1969 The Nineteenth Amendment On August 18, 1920 neither the United States nor any State could deny any U.S. citizen the right to vote on account of sex. (Constitution, 1987). Although the quest for equality was hard-fought, many of the women who worked for the vote were surprised they achieved it.
(Ryan, 1983). The vote meant more to women than merely controlling money and jobs and equality–the vote meant political power. Like all political changes affecting the United States, the vote was preceded by political discussion, and there were many brilliant women who spoke eloquently for women’s rights. For suffragists, the issue started with manufacturing. It moved white women out of the household into a world where they could earn more than $16-22 a month. (Ryan, 1983).
Unfortunately, the consequence of moving out of domestic employment left these low paying jobs to black women, which was not the intent of the movement. However, for purposes of achieving the vote, this consequence was ignored for the time being. In fact, reports Ryan, the politicos of the women’s suffrage movement at the turn of the century, for political reasons, occasionally donned the ugly garb of racism and xenophobia, claiming themselves superior to blacks and immigrants. These slogans were part of an arsenal of expedient devices suffragists used to achieve their goal. (Ryan, 1983).
One of the main leaders of the movement was Elizabeth Cady Stanton who wrote The Solitude of Self in 1892. (Stanton, 1892). She was one of the biggest proponents of self-sovereignty for women because she believed that ultimately all people came into the world alone and left the world alone–and for this reason they had to be self-reliant. Yet, under current conditions, women were denied self-reliancy, so Stanton’s main goal was to free up all institutions, particularly education for women. At the time, the only training women received was an elementary education, unless privileged, or training for factory jobs. This, said Stanton, did not provide women with the opportunity or training to use all her faculties for her own safety and happiness.
(Stanton, 1892). Personal happiness, according to Stanton, not only related to the Declaration of Independence, but also to the enjoyment of self-sufficiency. When a women could develop her mind, she would have the resources thus provided under all circumstances to mitigate the solitude that at times must come to everyone… (Stanton, 1892). Stanton was not interested in convincing men they should sympathize with woman’s plight, she said that what was important was fitting every human soul for independent action. (Stanton, 1892).
What she asked for was also constitutional–the complete development of every individual for first, his own benefit, and secondly for the general good. (Stanton, 1892). She said that women are already the equals of men in the whole realm of thought, in art, science, literature and government . . ., and their contributions had made them valuable to America. She said, Such is the type of womanhood that an enlightened public sentiment welcomes today, and such the triumph of the facts of life over the false theories of the past.
(Stanton, 1892). One of the most important iterations of the plight of women came from Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Gilman’s purpose was the opposite of Stanton’s. She wanted to show women’s struggle. She wanted to point out not only what she had experienced after leaving her husband, but also that her choices outside of that relationship were extremely limited.
She stated that wealth, power, social distinction, fame, even home and happiness, reputation, ease, pleasure, her bread and butter,–all must come to her through a small gold ring. (Gilman, 1898). Having to depend on men, Gilman said, put every woman in the position of being re-humanized over and over again in households owned by father, husband, brother–all of which resulted in restriction, repression, denial, and the smothering ‘no’ which crushed down all her h discover, to learn, to express, to advance… (Gilman, 1898). Using an argument familiar in the 1970s, Gilman expressed how this must seem to the future of young women, who knew they could break out of this mold without suffering economically.
Gilman wrote that this environment in which young woman grew was equivalent to slavery. Not only was every young girl meticulously trained for a domestic position through her early years, but she was expected to instruct her daughters to accept oppression. Gilman further stated that any woman who did not have a man to back her and wanted economic freedom was destined to become a whore and make her money in private and alone, [in] the first-hand industries of savage times. (Gilman, 1898). Because of this, the repression of women was, therefore, a reflection on society itself.
However, Gilman said, despite all of these realities known to young girls, despite the fact that women were repressed, a few women had broken out of that mold. These few had proven that women, who hold the same ideals men hold for themselves, could and had risen above their domestic status and had become important to the economy of America. Thomas wrote that this made women invincible, and used this as a means to empower the women who heard her. Men were intimidated by writings like Gilman’s, so even as men and women discussed the possibility of equality for women, they also discussed ways in which women should be repressed. The most common of these discussions evolved around the amount of education women needed, considering their domestic lifestyles.
As the discussion heated up, in 1901, Charles W. Eliot, the president of Harvard, was one of the first to express the idea that the education men received was of no service in women’s education. (Ravitch, 1991). Eliot believed that a woman’s education should include those things that served to further their domestic functions, and that separate educational models and schools should designed for them.
(Ravitch, 1991). Martha Carey Thomas believed that there was no such thing as women’s work, and that true equality was based on the ability of women to transcend those roles and join men as equals in all industries. Drawing upon her own education at Cornell and Johns Hopkins, which transcended the domestic, she wrote Once granted that women are to compete with men for self-support as physicians or lawyers..what is the best attainable training for the physician or the lawyer, man or woman? There is no reason that typhoid or scarlet fever or phthisis can be successfully treated by a woman physician in one way and by a man physician in another way. There is indeed every reason to believe that unless treated in the best way the patient may die…
(Thomas, 1901). She argued for the same intellectual training and the same scholarly and moral ideals. (Thomas, 1901). Thomas was the first to reach beyond equality and discuss discrimination. She wrote: .
. . over one-third of all graduate students in the United States are women… In the lower grades of teaching men have almost ceased to compete with women, in the higher grade, that is, in college teaching, women are just beginning to compete with men…
There are in the Untied States only eleven independent colleges for women… (Thomas, 1901). She said statistically No one could seriously maintain that, handicapped as women now are by prejudice in the highest branches of a profession peculiarly their own, they should be further handicapped by the professional training different from men’s… (Thomas, 1901). The importance of Thomas’s argument is that she backed it with statistics, proving why women should be educated the same as men, and that anything else was not tenable. She left the burden of proof on anyone who believed schools should be segregated.
(Thomas, 1901). All of these arguments were made articulately by women who were politically able to show their male counterparts that they were educated. Not only were they educated in politics and business, but many had educated themselves beyond grade school to become competitive. Finally, by 1920, their arguments were rewarded.
After more than eighty years of struggle, American women convinced the majority of American men to open up their ranks to a once totally disenfranchised and politically invisible population. (Ryan, 1983). Works Cited Gilman, C.P. (1898). Women and economics. The American Reader.
Ravitch, D. gen. ed. (1991).
New York: HarperCollins. pp. 204-206. Stanton, E.C. (1892).
The solitude of self. The American Reader. Ravitch, D. gen.
ed. (1991). New York: HarperCollins. pp. 201-204.
Ravitch, D., ed. (1991). The American Reader. New York: HarperCollins. pp.
208. Ryan, M. (1983). Womanhood in America, From Colonial Times to the Present, Third Ediction. New York: Franklin Watts. pp.
170, 213-215. Thomas, M.C. (1901). Should higher education for women differ? The American Reader. Ravitch, D.
gen. ed. (1991). New York: HarperCollins. pp.
208-211. MANIFEST DESTINY and THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY The Democratic party headed by President James K. Polk is manipulating the populous of the United States. President Polk, like his Democratic predecessor, is claiming to be a defender of all common men. However, this is only his public front.
He is actually controlling the system to ascertain personal wealth and political power. He then warrants his actions by preaching John L. Sullivan’s concept of Manifest Destiny. It has been known since the beginning of the 1840’s that the United States is prepared to begin expanding into Texas and further westward.
The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 has kept these Ripe Fruits waiting for the United States to harvest. President Polk’s Mexico policy is abusive against Mexicans, Native Americans, and is irrational considering Mexico’s feeble position. His personal political agenda is not in cadence with the fundamental principles that the United States is based on. Let it not be forgotten that expansion of this great Union is imperative to its survival.
The Democratic party has always catered to the emotions of the United States citizens. During the 1820’s the method of choosing presidential electors became public thus, the choosing of a President was more in the hands of the populous of this Union. Between the years of 1800 and 1828, twelve states in the union changed to having no property requirements for voting thus, from the election of 1824 to 1828, the number of people who voted increased three fold. The democratic party, president Jackson in particular, exploited this change in the public’s active participation. Jackson’s campaign was designed to be appealing to the working man and the lower classes, such as shopkeepers, farmers and small merchants. The attraction to him was illustrated by the rise of the common man.
Jackson stated that he feared a strong central government because it could become a tyranny …
