Renaming the civil war
...d issues of slavery, trade tariffs, and the doctrines of the states’ rights. This friction arose out of fundamental differences between the economies of the fundamental differences between the economies of the Northern and Southern States. The North had a growing manufacturing sector and small farms using labor, while the southern economy was based on plantations using slave labor. In the years before the Civil War the political power in the Federal Government, centered in Washington D.C., was changing. The Northern and Mid Western States were becoming more and more powerful as the populations increased. The Southern States were losing political power just as the original thirteen colonies fought for their independence almost 100 years earlier; the Southern States felt a growing need for freedom from the central Federal authority in Washington D.C. They felt that each State should make its own laws. This issue was called State’s Rights. Some Southern States wanted to secede, or break away from the United States of America and govern themselves. This was the main division between each individual state and caused conflict between each of them. In the 1850’s the Northern states wanted to prohibit slavery in the Western Territories that eventually became new states. The Southern States opposed all efforts to block the expansion of slavery and feared that the North stance would eventually endanger existing slave ownership in the South. The tension arose again when the Northerners had begun calling for the complete abolition of slavery. While the majority of the Southern States threatened to secede from the Union as a mean to protect their rights to keep slaves. Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States in 1860. He vowed to keep the country’s states united and the new western territories free from slavery. Many Southern states were afraid that he was not sympathetic to their way of life and would not treat them fairly. South Carolina was the first stated to secede from the United States soon after the election of Abraham Lincoln. Six other Southern states quickly followed and also seceded. So it was each individualized state that decided to secede from the Union instead of the whole southern half of America. As each state began to secede they began to form a new nation which was named the Confederate States of America. Through Lincoln’s inaugural address he tried to hold the states ...