Position:Home>History> United states history help!!?

~I won't do it for you either but there are some things you could look into that might help you along:

Read about the Philadelphia Convention and what the Virginia and Massachusetts delegations were saying about why a provision should be included expressly addressing the right of secession (which everyone knew was reserved to the 13 nations that formed the USA)!. This will not only explain what the regional differences were like at the founding of the nation and how they grew over the years, but it will also give you a better understanding of what really happened in 1860!. James Madison's notes are an excellent resource!.

Read about the Whiskey Rebellion and Shay's Rebellion!. Don't bother with the crap about how Washington led more troops to put down the insurrection than he led in the War for Colonial Independence (it was NOT a revolution)!. Read about why the folks in Massachusetts, New York, Western Pennsylvania and Northwestern Virginia sincerely believed that the federal government had failed to live up to its end of the Constitutional contract and why they were entitled to opt out!. The Adams boys, John and Sam, were pretty clear on how they didn't want the country that Morris and Madison intended to create but, rather, they wanted something more akin to Parliamentary Britain or the old oligarchy of the colonial period!. Jefferson was pretty cool on this one, and said some of the best things he ever wrote when addressing the topic!. Where was Tommy in the 1960s!? He'd have loved it!.

Read about what the New England States were saying when they threatened to secede in 1803 and in 1812 to 1815, and particularly read about what the southern statesmen said when they convinced New England not to do it!. Gouverneur Morris, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe and George Washington left behind some pretty neat insights on this one!.

Check out the South Carolina Nullification Act and Andy Jackson's response to it in 1837!. Check into the tariff laws that brought it about and what folks like John C!. Calhoun had to say concerning the way the northern industrialist, merchants and shippers were destroying the southern economy, monopolizing industrialization and preventing the south from expanding beyond its agrarian economy and how the south was getting sick and tired of paying 75% of national taxes only to see 75% of the federal revenue being spent in the north!. The arguments were similar in 1860 but the disparities and the gulf between North and South was much wider by then!.

As to slavery, you might want to read the Constitution!. Slave ownership was a constitutional right!. There was only a tiny minority in the North that wanted to abolish it!. It would have taken a constitutional amendment or state law to abolish it!. Sufficient support for ratification of such an amendment probably wouldn't have existed until 1880 - 1900 at least!. By then, especially with mechanized agronomy, slavery would have died a natural death in the south just as it had by 1837 in the north, when New Jersey finally got around to doing it (unless, of course, one considers Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware, Maryland, the illegally and unconstitutionally created West Virginia or Washington D!.C!. to be part of the North)!.

Read about the First and Second Confiscation Acts of 1862 and particularly the ravings of Charles Sumner to figure out why!. The Confiscation Acts, which purported to "free" the slaves in the South was designed as a weapon of war!. Sumner will tell you why it was such a potent WMD!. Lincoln, a few months later, fired his own salvo with the Emancipation Act, also as a tool of war and not out of humanitarian concerns!. Lincoln and Charles Seward will explain that to you!. You might also want to read up on some statistics about slaves and slave ownership and how many (most!?) owners of only 1 or 2 slaves had to rent them out to be able to afford to keep them!. Read about what Robert E!. Lee had to say on the subject, then compare it to what William Sherman said!. Oops, were these guys on the right side if the War for Southern Independence (it was NOT a civil war by any stretch of the imagination or any tortured perversion of the rules of language and logic) had anything to do with slavery!?

Then go back and read the debates about the Constitution!. Compare the Federalist Papers to what people like Morris and Ben Franklin and Tom Jefferson were saying!. The anti-Federalists were more than prophetic!. Some of them must have time traveled, they were so close in their predictions!.

Urbanization in the North!? Look to the Irish for this one!. Getting off the farm and opening shops, factories and railroads helped too!. So did consolidation of wealth into the hands of the few who guaranteed the growth of monopolies, deplorable working conditions, slums, tenements, company towns and abject poverty!.

Women!? Who cared!? You're a few decades early for this one, although there were some stirrings of discontent in the bedrooms and kitchens of the North and, more so, West!.

By all means, read the original sources!. Stay away from texts and use books only if you understand that the author is twisting the material to fit his or her own agenda!. If you understand the author's bias, using someone else's interpretation is fine, as long as you also read authors of other perspectives!. And NEVER forget that history is written by the victors, which tells you from the get go that you are not getting "truth" from them!.

Or go with the PC bull that the cotton gin caused everything that culminated in Fort Sumter!. You won't learn anything but you'll probably pass!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

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I have just studied this for Open University!. It is too complex to answer over this channel and I don't have a website for you !. I got all my information from the course materials!.
You will have go to the local library and do your own research the "old - fashioned " way!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

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