College of Business & IT Batkhela, Malakand AgencyENGLISH 1301

What is the “irrepressible conflict” according to William H. Seward (Document #7) and how does he specifically define the two sides involved? How does Alexander Stephens (Document #8) define the Confederacy and why does he believe secession is justified and  necessary? How does President Lincoln (Document #9) frame the Civil War and effort to restore the Union as a moral imperative?

Answer:

According to William H. Seward speech, Irrepressible Conflict refers to a prediction that he made about the collision of the socioeconomic institutions of the North and the South. When he refers to the collision term, he talks about if the growing nation would be dominated by a free labor or slave labor. When he argues “…all men are created equal…”[Sen58], he demonstrates her hate and repugnancy for the slave system saying it was inhuman and unjust. But even he was antislavery; he expresses that this conflict between this two sides, opposing and enduring forces, have to finish in some point. Either the United States will become a complete a slavery nation or a complete free nation. Moreover, he argues that this division between free and slave states was incompatible and the solution to that problem will lead to a civil war.

Alexander Stephens' speech proclaimed that discrepancy over the enslavement of Africans was an immediate cause of secession, and that the Confederate Constitution had solved those issues. Stephens argued that our Confederacy is founded with the principles of the white race were the higher one, the principle of the racial supremacy. He says no matter if you are a rich or poor white, whites are all equal in the eyes of the law[Ale61]. And, the negro where the subordinate race. He wrote that progress in science evidenced that enslavement of African Americans by white men was justified, and also that it agreed with the Bible's teachings. He highly disputes the idea that the is not equality in races and a negro never will be equal to a white man. That’s why the new government they created were founded in a completely different and he exclaims that this new government is the first in United States that is based in this moral and philosophical truth.

Since Stephens entered politics in 1834, he began to support secession in principle, but he mostly opposed it in practice. In his speech, he announced that slavery and white supremacy were not only the cause for secession if not also the cornerstone of the Confederate nation.

Although he defended arduously the institution of slavery, he also was engaged with the preservation of the Union. For that reason, he was a defender of the Compromise of 1850, which helped to avoid Southern secession. Stephens, at the same time all this was happening, also was working to keep a balance between the slave and free sates, and the new territories that were being introduced into the Union. That’s how came his idea to create the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed settlers in the new territories be able to choose if they wanted to approve slavery in their territory as a new state or not.

President Lincoln in his 1863 Gettysburg Address, adoped the Declaration of Independence as the foundation of the Republic. He expresses that foundation was indefinite by the apologists for slavery. When Mr. Lincoln said: "Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal"[Pre63], he was reminding people what should be the American spirit, and why we need to embrace this Declaration as a way of amending the Constitution itself without overturn it. Lincoln framed the Civil War as the only way to emancipate and to preserve the American heritage of liberty. He also argued that the Union it is much older than the Constitution, that the Constitution was created to preserve and “to form a more perfect Union”. That’s why he energetically expresses we need to fight to conserve that Union, the Union our fathers created to bring Liberty, because that’s the only way we would conserve our culture and fundaments.