Term Paper on "Civil War After the War of Independence"

Term Paper 4 pages (1344 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Civil War

After the War of Independence, the United States of America stretched no further than the Appalachian Mountains to the West. Feeling fully the vast potential of new lands, Congress drafted a key piece of legislation that would henceforth guide the process by which new states would be created and admitted to the Union. The legislation, called the Northwest Ordinance, was ratified in 1787, and outlined in detail the official statehood procedure: "So soon as there shall be five thousand free male inhabitants of full age in the district...they shall receive authority...to elect a representative from their counties or townships to represent them in the general assembly." When the population of the territory reached 60,000 voting age-males, a State Constitution must be delivered to Congress, which votes on whether or not to admit the state into the union. With the Northwest Ordinance, the creation of new states ensured that new states would be "on an equal footing with the original States." However clearly the Northwest Ordinance spelled out the rights and liberties of citizens of new states, one issue would become as contentious and divisive as to tear apart the nation one hundred years later. The issue was slavery.

As the United States acquired new territories to the west, the question of whether to extend the right of slave ownership to its citizens could not be decisively resolved. The free state/slave state issue was debated for decades in Congress. Although the Constitutional Convention had expressly outlawed the importation of new slaves after the year 1808, there were no laws preventing the proliferation of slavery or the slave trade domestically. Except in states that voluntarily banned or limited slavery, the "peculiar institution" remained an integral part of life in many parts of America.

The question of whether or not to admit new states as slave-holding or free states had a direct bearing on political representation of states in Congress. The Southern slaveholding states, fearing political disenfranchisement, wanted new states to be admitted as slaveholding ones in order to have more sympathizers in Congress. However, the abolitionist movement was growing stronger and more vocal, especially in the North. The massive land gains made when the United States purchased the French territory of Louisiana in 1803 complicated matters. The 500 million-plus acres of land acquired would be carved up into numerous states and territories, and the slave state/free state question became one of the main reasons why the nation eventually went to war in the 1860s.

The first territory from the Louisiana Purchase lands to be admitted to the Union was Missouri, in 1818, immediately brining to light the deepening rift between southern and northern sentiments. Missouri was being settled largely by slaveholding southerners, residents who hoped that the state would be admitted without any provisions restricting slavery within its borders. To their consternation and that of other Southern states, Northern Congressmen in the House of Representatives helped passed a bill that would admit Missouri as a free state. The bill failed to pass in the Senate. The crux of the free state/slave state issue was congressional representation: before Missouri was admitted to the Union, the number of slave states and free states was equal. To preserve the balance of power between slaveholding and free states, Congress needed to compromise. When Maine applied for statehood in 1820, Congress proposed what would become known as the Missouri Compromise: In exchange for admitting Maine as a free state, Missouri would be admitted as a slave state. Attached to the bill was the measure that physically demarcated north from south, a direct reminder of the sectionalism sweeping through the nation. The compromise provided that new states admitted north of the 36°30'N latitude lines would be automatically admitted as free. Because no other state entered the Union until 1836, the Compromise lasted a good two decades.

As Westward expansion flourished, driven by economic need and by manifest destiny, the balance of power was becoming more difficult to maintain in keeping with the provisions of the Missouri Compromise and… READ MORE

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