Essay #7

What Forces and Events Fueled Antislavery Movement?

Name

Institution

What Forces and Events Fueled the Antislavery Movement?

The decision in Dredd Scott case instigated the antislavery movement; however, the case did not explicitly legalize slavery in every state, but that was the next step clearly implicated by the decision that slavery could not be disallowed even where it did not exist. Lincoln expressed his concern in the “house divided” speech. Lincoln believed slavery was on the gradual road to extinction. He also knew that it would take a constitutional amendment to end slavery, which was very unlikely. The Civil war was based upon slavery. However, it was initiated by the Confederacy to protect and expand slavery. The Union response was, especially at first, aimed at protecting the union CITATION Article \l 1033 (Hine, C.Hine, & Harrold, 2011). The Dred Scott decision made the war more likely by trying to enforce a “solution” to slavery that was unacceptable to most people in the country. It forced people to harden their opinions and pushed more people to the extremes of pro or anti-slavery.

the fundamental issue of the Civil War was slavery, but it was also in part about what would become of the remaining states if the U.S allowed secession. The U.S would have eventually seen fragmentation and the country would have most definitely collapsed without the strength of a robust economy in such turbulent times, when the U.S was looking to expand and when the Mexicans and Europeans were very real threats. It’s very unlikely that any administration would let the South go without a fight, as the South comprised a very large part of the U.S. economy with not only its cotton production, but it’s manufacturing of other very important textiles as well. The reason the South had one is mainly because of the vast superiority of Northern industrialization (which arguably “began” in 1790 with Samuel Slater's cotton mill) that allowed the North to supply arms, food, and other materials to its troops via the railroads.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, for instance, enlisted federal power on behalf of southern slaveowners, annulling northern state laws that had tried to limit slave catching within their territory. (The act showed how little the South actually cared about "state's rights" when those rights interfered with the slave system.) The act was part of the Compromise of 1850 that resolved a bitter dispute over the status of the western territories captured in the Mexican-American War. Slavery was the dominant issue in national politics, inspiring heated rhetoric and melodramatic predictions of civil war CITATION Article \l 1033 (Hine, C.Hine, & Harrold, 2011). This unsatisfactory compromise patched the Union together for a few more years.

Four years later, the Kansas-Nebraska Act blew up that compromise and erased the former boundary between "free" and "slave" territory that had been established in 1820 with the Missouri Compromise. This act was far more incendiary than the Dred Scott decision that would follow it. Although the future states of Kansas and Nebraska were both in "free" territory, this act provided that settlers would be able to vote to establish slavery in those states by majority rule. This led to immigration by political partisans, followed by electioneering, fraud, intimidation, and finally a deadly proxy war between slave-state "Ruffians" and free-state "Jayhawkers" in Kansas. John Brown and his sons were among those who sought to secure the territory as a free state by any means necessary, including hacking five men to death with broadswords. This "Pottawatomie massacre" was just one of many such incidents of what we might now call domestic terrorism, but this one is remembered today because of Brown's involvement. Dred Scott gained its real significance after the war and the abolition of slavery when the decision was a dead letter (voided by the 14th and 15th amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1866) CITATION Article \l 1033 (Hine, C.Hine, & Harrold, 2011). In spite of that, Dred Scott continued to represent how decadent U.S. law could become, even at the highest level, for the sake of defending white supremacy.

References

BIBLIOGRAPHY Hine, D. C., C.Hine, W., & Harrold, S. C. (2011). Opposition to Slavery. In D. C. Hine, W. C.Hine, & S. C. Harrold, African American: A Concise History (pp. Pages From - To). NewYork: Pearson.