Causes of the Civil War DBQ

We hold . . . that on their separation from the Crown of Great Britain, the several colonies became free and independent States, each enjoying the separate and independent right of self-government; and that no authority can be exercised over them . . . but by their consent. . . . The Constitution of the United States is a compact formed between the several States . . . that the government created by it is a joint agency of the States, appointed to execute the powers enumerated and granted by that instrument; that all its acts not intentionally authorized are of themselves essentially null and void, and that the States have the right . . . to pronounce, in the last resort, authoritative judgment on the usurpations of the Federal Government.

The work of Monroe, and Madison, and Jefferson, is undone. The wall they erected to guard the domain of Liberty, is flung down by the hands of an American Congress, and Slavery crawls, like a slimy reptile over the ruins, to defile a second eden. They tell us that the North will not submit. We hope it will not. But we have seen this same North crouch lower and lower each year under the whip of the slave driver, until it is hard to tell what it will not submit to now. Who, seven years ago, would not have derided [mocked] a prophecy [prediction] that Congress could enact the kidnapping of free citizens, without judge or jury? . . . And yet, who now will deny that that prophecy is more than realized?

In this, the first election in the territory [of Kansas], a very large majority of the votes were cast by citizens of the State of Missouri . . . a systematic invasion, from an adjoining state, by which large numbers of illegal votes were cast . . . for the avowed purpose of extending slavery into the territory . . . was a crime of great magnitude. Its immediate effect was to further excite the people of the northern states, induce acts of retaliation, and exasperate the actual settlers against their neighbors in Missouri.

Picking cotton on a Georgia plantation, Ballou’s Pictorial, magazine, 1858.

Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guaranteed by that instrument to the citizen? One of which rights is the privilege of suing in a court of the United States. . . . We think they are not, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.

One of the chief elements of the value of human life is freedom in the pursuit of happiness. The slave system is . . . intolerable, unjust, and inhuman. . . . The free-labor system conforms to the divine law of equality, which is written in the hearts and consciences of man, and therefore is always and everywhere beneficial. The free-labor system educates all alike, and by opening all the fields of industrial employment . . . secures universal contentment, and brings into the highest possible activity all the physical, moral, and social energies of the whole state. In states where the slave system prevails, the masters, directly or indirectly, secure all political power, and constitute a ruling aristocracy. In states where the free-labor system prevails, universal suffrage necessarily obtains, and the state inevitably becomes, sooner or later, a republic or democracy.

We hold as undeniable truths that . . . in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, . . . while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States. . . . For these and other reasons, . . . we the delegates of the people of Texas, in Convention assembled, have passed an ordinance dissolving all political connection with the government of the United States of America.