Excerpt from The Outline of the World to-Day, Vol. 3
Wake, and scattered islands in the Pacific, and the Panama Canal Zone.
The Government is based on the Constitution of September I 7th, 1787, to which have been added some nineteen amendments. One of these amendments abolished slavery in 1865. Slavery had existed in several States and the Civil War arose over the contention about the division of the territories between slave States and free States. Under the compromise of 1820 it had been decided that slavery should not be interfered with in the States in which it existed when the Constitution was accepted, but the Mexican War brought additional territory under the dominion of the United States. The dispute over the question of slavery led the Southern States to claim the right to secede from the Union. The question resolved itself into one which meant that slavery could dominate the Republic. It was the aim of the Southern leaders to make slavery, which had heretofore been a sectional and, so to speak, a domestic matter, a national institution.
As Major G. H. Putnam has said: It is absurd to speak of the war as having been fought for the maintenance of State rights. The doctrine of the right of the States to individual action was, of course, invoked, but the issue would not have arisen if it had not been for this absolute cleavage between the opinions of the two sections as to the relation that Slavery was to bear to the national territory, and to the nation as a whole.
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