Photograph as originally submitted to this page in the Historical Marker Database www.HMdb.org. Click on photo to resize in browser. Scroll down to see metadata.

Photographer: Tom Bosse
Taken: July 5, 2018
Caption: Northern Causes for the Civil War
Additional Description: The major cause for the Union’s entry in the Civil War was resistance to southern secession. Lincoln’s desire to go to war conflicted with views he expressed thirteen years earlier on the floor of the House of Representatives, saying… “Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better…Nor is the right confined to cases in which the people of an existing government may choose to revolutionize, and make their own of such territory as they inhabit.” Distrusting the northern states, which held a majority of electoral votes electing Lincoln with only a plurality and his name not on the ballot in ten southern states, demonstrated to the south a loss of self-determination, thus their decision to secede. South Carolina ordered Union Fort Sumpter to vacate. When it did not, South Carolina fired o the Fort April 12, 1861. On September 22, 1862 Lincoln expanded the cause of the war with his Emancipation Proclamation, which excluded slaves in Kentucky, Missouri, Delaware and Maryland, or those of any southern states in rebellion, if by January 1, 1863, they reentered the Union. Southern secession was firm and emancipation was added to reasons for the war. The official proclamation was issued January 1, 1863, ensuring there would be no interference on behalf of the Confederacy by England, where slavery was outlawed. This made the emancipation decision tactically beneficial to the Union, if the south did not rejoin the Union, and the war continued. Called many different things in both north and south, Walt Whitman said it best… “It should be called the war against Secession.”
Submitted: November 13, 2018, by Tom Bosse of Jefferson City, Tennessee.
Database Locator Identification Number: p453731
File Size: 9.118 Megabytes

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