preview

How To Prevent The Civil War

Better Essays

“There is a terrible war coming, and these young men who have never seen war can’t wait for it to happen, but I tell you, I wish that I owned every slave in the South, for I would free them all to avoid this war” -Robert E. Lee, a commander of the Confederates States Army back in the Civil War. The American Civil War began on April 12, 1861 and ended on June 2, 1865. This is considered one of the deadliest wars in American history, with about 620,000 casualties and millions more wounded. The war started because the tensions between the northern and southern states were rising as years went on, debating issues such as states’ rights, slavery, and westward expansion. This war began when the Confederates open fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston, …show more content…

The United States of America could have avoided its dreaded civil war if the government officials worked together to come up with better solutions to solve the nation’s issues other than failed compromises, if states’ rights were acknowledged from the government, and if the leaders of the North and South were to make better choices. One idea how the United States could have prevented war from breaking out was that the government could have resolved much better than they did, creating temporary compromises. The civil war was triggered by the northern and southern states taking the issues of slavery, states’ rights, and westward expansion to the extreme. Congress tried to make compromises about this, like the Missouri Compromise for example, but it didn’t work because the Supreme Court overruled it as unconstitutional. The Missouri Compromise meant that any state above Missouri were free states, but since it was unconstitutional, this allowed those states to be slave states. This delighted Southerners and enraged Northerners. With the Supreme Court taking sides, and Congress making compromises doomed to fail, the country was in an even deeper depression …show more content…

The Constitution includes not only the rights of the people, but of the states as well. However, Lincoln and the rest of the government didn’t recognize the slavery states’ rights. Even if slavery was wrong, those states have rights to be independent, to run the way they want to. If the government, they would have prevented a war from happening and would have also followed the Constitution. For instance, according to an article by Sanderson Beck titled “How Lincoln Could Have Prevented Civil War,” it states, “He took the position that a minority who lost an election should not be allowed to withdraw from the nation, and he jumped to the erroneous conclusion that to do so would destroy democracy. Yet from the other point of view, he was denying democracy to the seceding states. If he had recognized their right to be independent states, surely both nations could have co-existed as republics. I do not believe that we should be blind to these democratic rights, as he was, simply because we believe that slavery is wrong or because we have a desire that the Union should be perpetual. Clearly the main motive for the South’s withdrawal from the Union was a bad one, but that does not mean that they did not have sovereign rights as states” (http://www.san.beck.org/LincolnCivilWar.html, 2008). This means that Lincoln didn’t acknowledge the states’

Get Access