The Civil Strife

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Leading up to the final outbreak of the Civil War, the issue of slavery was greatly avoided until it became a huge controversy from 1850 to 1861, especially between the North and the South. From the start of the nation’s beginning, the Founding Fathers had collaborated to create the Constitution, which was expected to unite the nation and its people together. Evidently, as slavery threatened to shred apart the union, the Constitution was proved powerless to alleviate the rising tensions. As time progressed, the Constitution’s imperfections were exposed one by one to the Americans. By the 1850’s, the Constitution had failed to produce clear terms on the process of determining whether new states would be free or slave-holding, the status of slaves and free blacks concerning the Fugitive Slave Acts, and the issue of secession within the discontented states. All the defects contributed to the ultimate failure of the nation, with the impending Civil War not far away. During the 1850’s, disputes over whether a newly admitted state would be a free or slave territory and the procedure of doing so had risen to dangerous levels, namely because the Constitution did not proclaim anything on slavery until later on. Previously, when the United States annexed a new state, northern and southern leaders had to maintain the sectional balance to avoid upsetting the equally distributed regional power. When California, New Mexico, and Utah applied to be admitted as states in 1849, the perplexity of preserving equilibrium baffled the government and its people. According to southerners and those who were pro-slavery, the Constitution had, in fact, recognized slavery. Since Southern men had aided in the acquirement of the new lands, they also believed ... ... middle of paper ... ...each region considered the other its enemy. Ever since the establishment of America, the Constitution vowed to conjoin the nation and bring the people together. Although this was the dream of the Founding Fathers, it failed to achieve its peak when slavery came into argument. By the 1850’s the Constitution’s purpose had fell short of its original image, and the government struggled to resolve all the issues including the failure to devise an effective way to decide whether slavery would exist within a new state, the discontent of slaves and free blacks in relation to the Fugitive Slave Acts, and the thwarting of secession within the South. When the controversies could no longer be contained, the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter. Indeed, the topic of slavery had torn apart the nation; the United States of America was anything but “united”.

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