History 263 THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION Fall 1997
First Longer Essay
Write an 8-10 page essay (typed or word-processed, double-spaced) exploring and assessing the validity of one of the following statements. Your paper should have a central thesis, and you should develop it in a clear, concise, and coherent fashion. Be sure to support your assertions with specific evidence drawn from a wide variety of the assigned readings and computer resources. You are expected to demonstrate command of competing interpretations and to take into account scholarly views that differ from your own. Thus it is not enough simply to affirm your position; you should anticipate plausible objections to your argument and endeavor to refute them. Papers will be evaluated on the basis of both content and presentation. Provide footnotes or endnotes for all direct quotations, paraphrased passages, and important assertions derived from the work of others.
Papers are due at the instructor's office (King 141-G) by 5 p.m. on Friday, October 17. Late papers may be penalized.
Statements:
1. "The triumph of the Republican party in 1860 represented a victory of genuine good over real evil. For decades northern politicians had compromised with the South because they didn't really care about black rights. But the Republicans were different. Like the abolitionists, the Republicans opposed the expansion of black slavery on moral, not just economic or political, grounds. Abraham Lincoln made this point clear in his debates with Stephen Douglas. Indeed, had their antislavery sentiments not been so firmly grounded in moral righteousness, the Republicans would have struck a deal with disunionists during the Secession Crisis, and the Civil War would have been avoided."
2. "The necessary and sufficient cause of the Civil War was the emergence of conflicting sectional ideologies rooted in the different labor systems and political economies of the North and the South. The political leaders of the 1850s undoubtedly made their share of blunders, but in retrospect it is evident that the situation was fundamentally beyond their control. The socioeconomic and ideological divergence of North and South during the first half of the nineteenth century made military conflict inevitable."
3. "The coming of the Civil War reveals that American history has been shaped not only by the rich and powerful, but also by the poor and oppressed. Had northern and southern elites been left to manage sectional issues on their own , there would have been no Civil War. The elites had complementary economic interests: northern industrialists needed cotton for their textile mills, and southern planters needed manufactured goods as well as markets for their crops. It was the elites' inability to keep the lower classes under control that led to military conflict. First pressure from plebeian whites broke up the Second Party System, and then pressure from enslaved blacks propelled the issue of human bondage to center stage in American politics. The Civil War was caused by those at the bottom, not at the top, of American society."
4. "The Civil War was a ghastly mistake. White northerners and white southerners had much more in common than they realized at the time fighting broke out. They spoke the same language, and they shared the same basic values and heritage. The majority on both sides believed in the principles of republican government, the natural right to accumulate property, and the promise of Christian salvation. Almost nobody believed in racial equality. All that really divided North from South was the dispute over slavery, a labor system doomed by the irreversible progress of capitalist development. Had hysteria not swept the nation during 1860-61, the sectional conflict could have been resolved and emancipation accomplished peacefully in the years to come."