Реферат: From Oppressed Slaves To Champion Soldiers Essay

part of the idea that the states have rights and powers which the federal government

cannot legally deny. The supporters of states’ rights held that the national government

was a league of independent states, any of which had the right to secede.

In December 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede. Five other states

– Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana – followed in January 1861. In

February, representatives from the six states met in Montgomery, Ala., and established

the Confederate States of America. They elected Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as

president and Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia as vice president. In March, Texas

joined the confederacy. Lincoln was inaugurated two days later.

In his inaugural address, Lincoln avoided any threat of immediate force against the

South. But he stated that the Union would last forever and that he would use the

nation’s full power to hold federal possessions in the South. One of the possessions,

the military post of Fort Sumter, lay in the harbor of Charleston, SC. The Confederates

fired on the fort on April 12 and forced its surrender the next day. Following the firing

on Fort Sumter, Fredrick Douglass wrote a fiery editorial Nemesis:

At last our proud Republic is overtaken. Our National Sin has found us out. The National

Head is bowed down, and our face is mantled with shame and confusion. No foreign arm

is made bare for our chastisement. No distant monarch, offended at our freedom and

prosperity, has plotted our destruction no envious tyrant has prepared for our necks his

oppressive yoke. Slavery has done it all. Our enemies are those of our own household.

It is civil war, the worst of all wars, that has unveiled its savage and wrinkled front

among us. During the last twenty years and more, we have as a nation been forging a

bolt for our own national destruction, collecting and augmenting the fuel that now

threatens to wrap the nation in its malignant and furious flames. We have sown the

wind, only to reap the whirlwind. Against argument, against all manner of appeal and

remonstrances coming up from the warm and merciful heart of humanity, we have gone

on like the oppressors of Egypt, hardenin! g our hearts and increasing the burdens of

the American slave, and strengthening the arm of his guilty master, till now, in the pride

of his giant power, that master is emboldened to lift rebellious arms against the very