“It’s true that there was more to the secession crisis that followed President Lincoln’s election in 1860, and the war that followed that, than just the issue of slavery or its expansion into the west.”(Mataconis, 2013). In 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected president with only Northern electoral votes and beat the southern candidate Stephen A. Douglas. Many states did not agree with Lincoln’s policy. In response, South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union. They believed that Lincoln was anti slavery and in favor of northern interests. Before Lincoln was even president, seven states had seceded from the Union: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. The civil war was a fight to preserve the Union which was the United States of America. There were two differing opinions on the role of the federal government and the executive needed to maintain their power in order to ensure the survival of the Union. On the other hand, Anti Federalists held that states should retain much of their sovereignty with the new nation. They believed that each states should have the right to determine the laws within its own borders and should not be forced to follow the Commands if the federal government unless they absolutely need too. “Economic differences between the increasingly industrialized North and the largely agrarian South had become quite extreme and …show more content…
Lincoln as well as many other statesmen believed that the country could not continue to exist as two nations under one government. In some form the two opposed ideologies had to settle their differences. However, because the differences were so fundamentally important to each section, politically compromise would have ultimately led only to one side’s economic and social ideology being wiped out. Both sides were unwilling to let their establishment damaged by the other. Eli Whitney’s invention changed the stakes as it revived a dying establishment and set it in place as king of the southern economy without which the south felt it could not survive. The North and the South did not develop along similar economically or ideologically. At some stage the two opposing sides would unavoidably come into military conflict once all compromised were