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Confederacy vs. U.S. (Union): Which had a greater cause to fight for?
On November 6, 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States, an event the made many southern states angry. On December 20, 1860 South Carolina seceded and many more southern states followed. The seceded states created the Confederacy and elected themselves a president. Abraham Lincoln stated “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. It will become all one thing or the other.” On April 12 the Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter causing the Civil War to begin. The North was fighting to preserve the Union making it a greater cause to fight for because it wanted to prevent from having to separate countries, it wanted to stop the spread of slavery, and wanted to show everyone that democracy works. In order for the North to preserve the Union it could not allow the South to separate because that means that there would be two countries. If the Union had let the Confederate states to secede and form their own country, it would have left both countries weaker and possibly lead to more wars. If the country was divided into two there would be a lot of political disagreement, this would cause a lot of issues like going to war for resources since the North was industrialized and the south provided the raw goods like cotton for example.
The Union cannot be preserved unless slavery was abolished. The Union represented the most advanced form of democracy in the world at the time. The Declaration of Independence, which was an imported source of democracy, stated that "all men are created equal."But all men weren’t created equal in America. At that time there were 1 million African slaves in the country. The Southern states were heavily dependent on their labor in order for south to prosper. Slavery was the key to producing cotton, which was a main resource for the south. Since the North was industrialized and the South was more agricultural, both had many conflicts over trade policy. The biggest battles of all were over the addition of new states to the Union because it could tip the balance of power in the federal government between slave states and free states. Since the Union was Lincoln's first priority he wrote "I shall do less whenever I shall believe that I am doing hurts the cause and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause." One thing that Lincoln did to "help the cause", was to write the Emancipation Proclamation. The