Comments on the reasons for the American Civil War

     One hundred and fifty years ago the great experiment in Democracy, known as America, was put to the test.  The Constitutional Union which had been created in Philadelphia, during the hot summer of 1787, was threatened by the issues of slavery and regional economics.   In the month following the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, on March 4th 1861,  southern attitudes began to harden even though they purported to want peace.  Many in the southern leadership, including Senator Louis Wigfal of Texas, felt that Lincoln lacked the resolve to go to war.  They based their impression of Lincoln on the mistaken belief that Lincoln was weak.  In a speech to the Senate on March 2nd 1861 Senator Wigfal made the following statement about Lincoln "under the apprehension that, on Monday next, at the precise hour of twelve, the aforesaid Abraham is to swallow the Chicago platform and go for peace. I do not know how this is. I rather suspect it is true. I do not think that a man who disguises himself in a soldiers cloak and a scotch cap and makes his entree between day and day, into the capital of the country he is going to govern, I hardly think he is going to look war sternly in the face."   How wrong they were to hold Lincoln in such contempt, these men of the south who thought him ill prepared, uneducated, inexperienced, and weak.  Their thinking lead them to seek advantage through aggressive actions such as the siege of Ft Sumter.  They did not foresee that such action would be meet with Lincoln's hard resolve to preserve the union at all cost.