Secession and U.S. History
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From the vantage point of the 20th century - and in the textbooks through which most people have learned their American history - Secession seems to have been a pretty simple affair. The eleven Southern States, wishing to continue their practice of slavery so as not to lose their economic base of tobacco farming - withdrew from the United States during the years 1860-61 to form the Confederate States of America. The act of secession was formally accomplished in the individual states through a convention either called by the state legislature or, as in the case of Texas, self-assembled and it prompted the Civil War, a war fought by American patriots not only to defeat the terrible institution of slavery but also to rescue the beloved Union from a terrible and permanent dissolution.In fact the process of Secession was certainly not this simple a process. Nor was it so pure a one morally from the point of the Union nor so patriotic a one. The unanimity of both the North and the South has tended to be emphasized over the years until both sides have come to be seen as politically and culturally nearly monolithic, which was never the case. Secession was a complex issue and historical actuality - complicated legally, morally, and politically. It was certainly not supported by all those living in the South, and one can only assume that some of those people living in the North did see it as the right of states to withdraw if they chose (in fact, long before even the whispers of Civi
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This insistence upon the importance of states' rights - while serving for many as the compelling justification for the establishment of the Confederacy - would ironically prove to be one of the major forces that doomed the South to defeat. As Owsley notes, any confederacy built on anti-federalist principles is bound to have trouble holding itself together.
We are in the habit of ascribing as the causes of the failure of the Confederacy the blockade, lack of industrial development and resources, breakdown of transportation, inadequate financial system, and so on, all of which are fundamental; yet, in spite of all of these, if the political system of the South had not broken down under the weight of an impracticable doctrine put into practice in the midst of a revolution, the South might have established its independence.
Ironically - and a point that speaks to the deep divisions that existed amongst the Southern states, the rhetoric of high taxation and insufficient representation and overly zealous federal governments was not simply raised by the Southern States against the U.S. government, but also by the border states in the South and those people whose caution and fear of revolution gave them the title of cooperat
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Barnwell Rhett, Southerners Constitution, Civil War, United Constitution, Union North, Party's Lincoln's, Abraham Lincoln, Maryland Virginia, Union Gulf, South Expansion, civil war, civil war war, federal government, war southerners, war war, tobacco farming, regional differences, status quo, slave territory, war fought, expansion simply,
Approximate Word count = 2469
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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