Douglass Vs Abraham Lincoln Analysis

African Americans have had it hard ever since we arrived to the New World that we now call the Americas; we have been abused and demeaned beyond despair. For centuries, we have been fighting to be treated as we deserved, but laws along with intimidation in addition to everything else harmful to African Americans were set forth to keep them from advancing as a whole. Fast forward to the president election of 1860: Stephen Douglass vs Abraham Lincoln. Although some businesses up North benefitted from slavery, owning slaves and running a plantation meant having wealth and power down South; the South’s economy depended on slaves to thrive. During the election, Lincoln promised not to abolish slavery, but to keep slavery from spreading to the US territory. Slave states threatened to separate themselves from the North if Lincoln becomes president out of fear that he will work to eventually demolish slavery. After Lincoln won the election, South Carolina seceded that December to form The Confederate States of America while the other Southern states followed suit. Five years later, Lincoln …show more content…
Life was rapidly changing. The North and the South had totally composing viewpoints on whether or not slavery should spread westward to the newly acquired territories of the US. Some Northerners felt as if slavery was utterly ridiculous and should be illegal, while some Northerners were indifferent to slavery as long as it didn’t spread; others benefitted from slavery because cotton from down south was used in textile factories in comparison to the south where cotton was the major crop harvested. Cotton happened to be the entire south’s money maker. Black people were advancing as a human race, slavery had been abolished, the Confederacy took a loss in the Civil War, and free, black Union troops being sent to the South all played a big role in causing the 1866 Memphis Race