No event affected the United States and its people more significantly than the Secession (leaving the United
States and forming their own government) of eleven Southern states and the Civil War that followed. Four
years of bloody warfare, over one-half million deaths, untold misery and destruction, and long-lasting racial and
sectional hatreds resulted. Even today, one and a half centuries later, America is still marked—politically,
economically, and socially—by these awful events.
Americans who witnessed the secession of the Southern states, and historians ever
since, have argued over the causes. Why, after eighty-five years of unity and common
nationhood, did the United States break apart? Was secession an accident, the result of mistakes, political
misjudgments, and passions that overwhelmed reasonable compromise? What parts did slavery, the debate
over its expansion into the territories, and the rancorous conflict of its supporters and opponents play in
bringing on secession?
Develop a THESIS (answering WHY the South seceded, based on your own knowledge from class, and
backed up with information from 6 PRIMARY SOURCE (of the Civil War Time) documents.) (3 pages, double
spaced)
1.Over what issue did the Southern Democratic and the Northern Republican parties
seem totally at odds? Could not agree??hostile legislation
2 How does this statement help to explain why so many non-slaveholding Southerners supported slavery?
3 Do you really think it’s true that Lincoln and the Republican Party is the cause of the problems, like this
newspaper says?
4 According to George Templton Strong , what were the factors in the US “breakup” do you think Sen Stephen
Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska act the REAL cause?
5 What reason did South Carolina give for leaving the US? Was this true?
What does Jefferson Davis mean by “hostile legislation” and “raids of organized bodies?
Sample Solution
