In this lesson, you have learned that the cause of the Civil War is not as simple as it seems. It involved many issues and diffe
rent viewpoints. On June 16, 1858, two-and-a-half years before the outbreak of the Civil War, President Lincoln gave a speech that became known as the "House-Divided" speech. The next day, Stephen Douglas responded to that speech. Your job for this assignment will be to analyze excerpts from these speeches.
Historians have traditionally regarded the series of seven debates between Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln during the 1858 Illinois state election campaign as among the most significant statements in American political history. The issues they discussed were not only of critical importance to the sectional conflict over slavery and states’ rights but also touched deeper questions that would continue to influence political discourse. As Lincoln said, the issues would be discussed long after “these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent.”
What is often overlooked is that the debates were part of a larger campaign, that they were designed to achieve certain immediate political objectives, and that they reflected the characteristics of mid-nineteenth-century political rhetoric. Douglas, a member of Congress since 1843 and a nationally prominent spokesman for the Democratic party, was seeking reelection to a third term in the U.S. Senate, and Lincoln was running for Douglas’s Senate seat as a Republican. Because of Douglas’s political stature, the campaign attracted national attention. Its outcome, it was thought, would determine the ability of the Democratic party to maintain unity in the face of the divisive sectional and slavery issues, and some were convinced it would determine the viability of the Union itself. “The battle of the Union is to be fought in Illinois,” a Washington paper declared.
The biggest difference was the strictly racist nature of German Nazism. Though heavily nationalistic and despite Mussolini ultimately introducing anti-Jewish laws to follow Hitler's lead, Italian Fascism was never principally racist.
<span>Political power shifted from the central government to local notables and military strongmen. </span> This led to civil wars in the kingdoms that furthermore weakened the initially powerful governments. The weak central governments could also not withstand the emerging imperialistic pressures from western powers. As a result the empires crashed one by one, and parts of their territories were taken over by the major imperial powers. <span />
The blanket primary was ruled unconstitutional in 2000 by the Supreme Court of the United States in California Democratic Party v. Jones, as it forced political parties to associate with candidates they did not endorse. ... The Washington State Republican Party had earlier dropped out of the appeal process.
