Essay Help : Rise of Lincoln and the Republican Party - Essay Samples

Rise of Lincoln and the Republican Party - Essay Samples

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Rise of Lincoln and the Republican Party

The most effective critic of the decision was Abraham Lincoln, a relatively unknown Illinois lawyer, whose brilliant attacks on the case thrust him on to the national political scene. It is always dangerous to offer a Eugene Field House counter-factual history of what would have happened if “x” or “y” had not occurred. It seems likely, however, that had Field not become Scott’s attorney, and effectively raised important federal questions, and the history of the 1850s would have been different. Had Field not brought the case into federal court, Scott’s quest for freedom would have ended in 1852. Some other event might have allowed Lincoln to become a national figure. But it is just as likely that Lincoln would have remained a relatively obscure local leader of the new Republican Party. It is also possible, that without Field’s intervention, the Republican Party would have lost its momentum after the 1856 election. We should not take this argument too far. Surely a crisis over slavery was developing in the 1850s. The Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and northern hostility to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 all undermined political and sectional stability. Events in Kansas surely threatened the nation. But, Dred Scott in some ways forced the issue. By asserting the right of a black to sue for his freedom in federal court – a right never before claimed – Field altered the political and legal landscape. Some other lawyer might have done so, but no other lawyer stepped forward.

Field did step forward. He did make unique and important arguments about race and fundamental rights under the Constitution. His arguments were powerful enough to force Chief Justice Taney to answer them with what can only be described as massive judicial overkill. That opinion was in part forced by Field’s arguments in the federal court in St. Louis. The response to that opinion thrust Lincoln onto the national political stage and led the nation’s first antislavery political party to victory in 1860. Field’s brief contribution to our national history was critical. It makes the house he lived in at the time worthy of landmark status. (National Historic Landmark Application, 2004 p 12)

Southern elites made it quite clear that their reason for secession from the Union was the desire to maintain and extend the institution of slavery and white supremacy, which institutions they felt were threatened by the rise of Lincoln and the Republican Party. One might think that seceding and going to war to defend slavery would hardly meet with the approval of poor white folks, who didn't own slaves. After all, if slaves can be made to work for free, any working class white person who must charge for their labor will be undercut by slave labor, and find it harder to make ends meet. Yet by convincing poor whites that their interests were racial, rather than economic, and that whites in the South had to band together to defend "their way of life," the elites in the South conned these same lower-caste Europeans into joining a destructive war effort that cost hundreds of thousands of lives (Manning, Chandra, 2007)

Truth is, Lincoln and his gang of Republican Elitists rebelled against the Founders and the Constitution, and everything they stood for- THEY declared war against those truly American freedom-packed things, and THAT is what the Lincoln rebellion and war was over! BUT IT WAS LINCOLN AND HIS ELITE REPUBLICAN GANG WHO DID ALL THE REBELLING!! And they did it very violently, to put it mildly! Lincoln and the new Republicans did NOT want liberty, independence, or freedom for the people. Lincoln was so powerful and threatening with just the handful of men that were in this take-over with him, that even Congress did not fight him for long, but gave into every demand he had, even though they knew it was all Un-Constitutional. (Truth about The 'Civil War', 2008)

Lincoln would not accept anything but complete victory for all of it, and he made sure that even if families and children had to be slaughtered in order to get those signatures he wanted, it would be done, and was in many cases!

 

Work Cited
TRUTH ABOUT THE 'CIVIL WAR' (The War of Northern Aggression), Extracted on: 17 February 2008, Available at: http://home1.gte.net/carriet/TruthCivilWar.htm
National Historic Landmark Application (2004), Available at: http://www.eugenefieldhouse.org/National%20Historic%20Landmark%20Final%202004.pdf Extracted on: 17 February 2008
Manning, Chandra, 2007. What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery and the Civil War. P-12