Individuals That Contributed To The Civil War Essay

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Individuals That Contributed To The Civil War The Civil War was brought about by many important people, some that wanted to preserve and some that wanted to eradicate the primary cause of the war, slavery. There were the political giants, such as Abraham Lincoln, and Stephen Douglas. There were seditious abolitionists such as John Brown, escaped slaves such as Dred Scott, and abolitionist writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe. These were the people who, ultimately, brought a beginning to the end of what Lincoln called “a moral, a social, and a political wrong”(Oates 66). Southern states, including the 11 states that formed the Confederacy, depended on slavery to support their economy. Southerners used slave labor to…show more content…
With the passage of this act, a new Lincoln emerged into the world of politics. Although he was as ambitious for political office as ever, he was now, for the first time in his career, devoted to a cause. He became a forceful spokesman for the antislavery forces. In 1857, the Supreme Court of the United States added to the mounting tension by its decision in the Dred Scott Case. Dred Scott was a slave owned by an army surgeon in Missouri. “In 1836, Scott had been taken by his owner to Fort Snelling, in what is now Minnesota, then a territory in which slavery was explicitly forbidden according to the Missouri Compromise”(Oates 50). In 1846, he brought a suit in the state court on the grounds that residence in a free territory liberated him from slavery. The Supreme Court of Missouri, however, ruled that since he was brought back into a state where slavery was legal, the status of slavery was reattached to him and he had no standing before the court. The Scott case was then brought before the federal court which still held against Scott. The case was finally appealed to the Supreme Court, where it was argued at length in 1856 and decided in 1857. “The decision handed down by a majority vote of the Court was that there was no power in the existing form of government to make citizens slave or free, and that at the time of the
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