PANIC IN THE USA

1. PANIC IN THE USA The election of 1860!

2. How do we solve this?

3. Up till now In 1857 the United States Supreme Court's decided against DredScott, a slave living in a free territory, in his case for citizenship and denied it for all U.S. blacks. In 1858 two Illinois Candidates for U.S. Senate, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, engaged in the Lincoln-Douglas debates over slavery and its moral issues and thus propelled Lincoln to recognition. The Republican Party knew they could get no southern votes but aimed for getting most of the North. William H. Seward was the most prominent Republican having been a governor and senator but was disliked. Abraham Lincoln was more inspiring, less radical, and shared the same views. The party appealed to many groups, especially young people. Lincoln said the Declaration did in fact include blacks and while pledging not to interfere with slave states, wanted slavery completely gone.

4. Breckinridge vs. Lincoln

5. The controversy’s on If Lincoln won many states said they would secede and most of the votes went to him and Candidate John C. Breckinridge representing Southern Democrats. During all this debate the President Buchanan was still in office and he considered secession to be treason and a ruin of the example of democratic success the U.S. had had. European monarchists enjoyed the threat of disunion which was agreed by some to be unconstitutional. To which the south responded by claiming they had the right to revolution because the U.S. had seceded from Britain. Except this time it was not for moral reasons. The presidential election of 1860 was completely focused on the slavery puzzle, it could no longer be ignored and action from either side of the debate would bring detachment, and obscured anything else.

6. Party people Also in the election, but with fewer votes, were candidates John Bell for the Constitutional Union Party and Douglas for Northern Democrats with both decided at national conventions. The Democratic National Convention was held in Charleston, South Carolina on April 23rd, 1860 but southern delegates just absolutely would not support Douglas and his popular sovereignty policy and ended without even naming a candidate. The Republican one met mid-May in Chicago and, as we know, refused Seward as well as another man, Salmon P. Chase, nominating our hero, Mr. Lincoln. This two–party system began developing in the 1830s and both parties tried very hard to prevent sectional differences from becoming the focus of politics and were doing all right up until the Manifest Destiny craze and the war that left us with massive amounts of new land.

7. A nation divided

8. The equality mindset When it came to the social development of the North and South, the South had been doing really well as far as international markets, but stayed secure to a plantation system that depended on slave labor. An increasing number of poor whites were finding they had competition when it came to the job market because of the one-third of all Southerners who were black enslaved by the plantation system. Earlier, I mentioned that slavery’s domination within the government had obscured any other topics and one topic, in the very background of discussion was tax-supported public schools. Whigs, before they would later change into the Constitutional Union Party and also fall into obscurity, felt schools would build character so that they may have a more perfect society. However, I bring this up because Southerners and Democrats felt it might give equal opportunity to all whites, as if that were a negative thing!

9. By 1861, the year Lincoln was elected as the 16th president, the south had formed the Confederate States of America, recently seceded from the Union, with Jefferson Davis as their president. The Compact Theory, as pressed by Southerners, was another way they justified secession. South Carolina seceded from the Union about the end of December 1860. Slave states asserted strongly that the Constitution was in fact not a perpetual union but a ‘compact between independent states that retained their sovereignty’. So, the representatives of these states pretty much stated, ‘we were here because we wanted to be but these days we don’t like what you’re saying’ and so this ‘compact’ could be broken same as it had been created. Before Lincoln could even be inaugurated after his overwhelming victory in the Electoral College six more states left the Union. Is it the end?!

10. As early as the Constitutional Convention of 1787, American leaders had known that they could not settle the differences between the states committed to slavery and those that were not. The three–fifths rule, the constitutional promise not to halt the international slave trade until 1808, and the banning of slavery in the Northwest Territory were all attempts to avoid confronting differences between the North and South.