how did the American civil war start and how did Abraham Lincoln help start it?

how did the American civil war start and how did Abraham Lincoln help start it?
im doing a project in history about the civil war i need to know how the american civil war started and what Abraham Lincoln did to help start it?

Answer by John Galt
The American civil war didn’t start at a particular point in time, as such; and Lincoln really didn’t contribute to its beginning… much. I can’t say he didn’t contribute at all; I mean the original Southern secession states seceded as a direct result of his election.

Basically though; he was elected; and before he even gave his inaugural address, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas seceded.He stated in his Inaugural address that he would “Hold and maintain” federal property; he didn’t say anything about Secession actually.

So, he carried through with that pledge; in fact he actually tried to placate the South to a degree even after the Secession started. For example; Edwin Stanton (Secretary of war) told him to seize the Norfolk Naval yards in Virginia in the event of the secession of Virginia. He refused to do so; in the hopes that his gesture of goodwill would be returned, and Virginia wouldn’t secede too.

What you’re talking about with him helping to start it was he also tried to supply Fort Sumter. He actually notified the Virginia government government; told them he wasn’t reinforcing it with troops; and said the US government would notify them of further reinforcements.

They fired on the ship anyway; and then proceeded to fire on the fort for several hours afterwards until the garrison surrendered. After that, there really was no avoidance of conflict possible.

Answer by loryntoo
Lincoln helped start it by being elected. The South feared he would put abolishing slavery high on his agenda so states started seceding from the Union. Some in the South hoped they’d be allowed to go peacefully, but most knew it wouldn’t happen without a fight.

For the South, the issue was a state’s right to leave the Union. For the North, the overriding issue was preserving the Union. Freeing the slaves was strictly an Abolitionist platform.

In the spring of 1861, Union military authorities arrested Maryland farmer John Merryman on charges of treason against the United States for burning railroad bridges around Baltimore in an effort to prevent northern soldiers from reaching the capital. From his prison cell at Fort McHenry, Merryman petitioned Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger B. Taney for release through a writ of habeas corpus. Taney issued the writ, but President Abraham Lincoln ignored it. In mid-July Merryman was released, only to be indicted for treason in a Baltimore federal court. His case, however, never went to trial and federal prosecutors finally dismissed it in 1867.

In Abraham Lincoln and Treason in the Civil War, Jonathan White reveals how the arrest and prosecution of this little-known Baltimore farmer had a lasting impact on the Lincoln administration and Congress as they struggled to develop policies to deal with both northern traitors and southern rebels. His work sheds significant new light on several perennially controversial legal and constitutional issues in American history, including the nature and extent of presidential war powers, the development of national policies for dealing with disloyalty and treason, and the protection of civil liberties in wartime.

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How long did Abraham Lincoln serve in the Civil War?
I am doing a biography in which i have to write as though i am abraham lincoln. I need to know how long he served in the civil war, When he became prez., And how long he was president!? please help thx!

Answer by JustMia
GOOGLE

Answer by Friedrich Schulz
He was president through the entire Civil War.

Answer by Lauren A
He never served in the war. He pretty much started it by writing the emancipation proclamation. He was president throughout the whole thing. If you want to know any more, just type his name into your browser and click search.

Answer by Oscar Himpflewitz
~He was first elected as a Progressive Whig in 1852. When he decided to run for a third term in 1860, Delaware was outraged and seceded. Others soon followed suit soon thereafter. The war started with the Battle of Culver Springs, Kentucky, on February 2, 1862. Lincoln was assassinated on July 12, 1863. Thus, he served as president for 17 months and 10 days during the war, but he served as president for 11 years and 4 months. Surely you could have found this much by just looking at as source as poor and unreliable as Wikipedia.

Edit to Donny: I won’t go into why it was NOT a civil war (Lincoln himself argued in favor of the right of secession on the floor of Congress on January 12, 1848 – it was, after all, the core principle of the Declaration of Independence and an understood given by the Founding Fathers), but Lincoln did indeed serve. He took his role as Commander-in-Chief quite seriously. The redundant Emancipation Proclamation (the Confiscation Acts had purported to do the same thing months earlier) did not come at the end of the war. It was announced in January, 1863, about mid-point in the conflict. It was illegal and unconstitutional and was introduced as a tool of war, a weapon of mass destruction if you will, and was but one of the actions Lincoln took during his leadership of the invading armies of the north into the free and independent nations of the CSA.

Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865. That did not end the war and there were other CSA armies still in the field – notably those of Joe Johnston, John Bell Hood and Edmund Kirby Smith, but others as well. Lincoln died on April 15, 1865. The war continued after his death (not long, to be sure, but it continued with Andrew Johnson at the helm of the federal forces as Commander-in-Chief – knight seems to be the only one cognizant of that elementary fact, and kudos to him for knowing it). If you want to claim the war started with the passage and ratification of the southern Ordinances of Secession, seven states had passed and ratified them while James Buchanan was still president. True, the first shots at Fort Sumter weren’t fired until April, 1861 after Lincoln was inaugurated. When did the war start. The USA never declared war because from Lincoln on down no one was foolish enough to do so. To declare war would have been to admit the legality of secession and the independence of the nations that had chosen to leave the confederation of nations called the USA. [Duh, the Constitution creates a federal government, not a national one. That alone should tip one off to the fact that the Founding Fathers had no intention of giving up the independence of the thirteen nations created by the Treaty of Paris when the British granted independence to the colonies in 1783.]

Laura, if you want to write a biography of Lincoln, please don’t attribute to him any desire to end slavery where it existed. Read his first inaugural address. He knew he had no authority to do so. In fact, if you read their personal papers, you will readily see that Robert E Lee was more opposed to the ‘peculiar institution’ than was Lincoln. Slave ownership was a constitutional right at the time and could only be abolished by constitutional amendment or state law. There was not enough support in the north to ratify such an amendment and, in fact, in January 1861 the Republican dominated northern majority in congress passed the Corwin Amendment. Corwin, if ratified, would have become Amendment XIII and would have prohibited any future attempt to amend the constitution to abolish slavery. Obviously, the southern states did not secede over the slavery issue, and the north did not fight to end slavery.

Lincoln wanted to “preserve the union”. To do so, he had to ignore the basic facts of US history, to deny the right to secede that was a historical given (the New England states had threatened to secede in 1803, 1812, 1814 and 1815; states in the north and south alike threatened to secede over the illegal and unconstitutional Missouri Compromise in 1820; Thomas Jefferson and James Madison authored the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, effectively arguing the right to secede, in 1798. To ‘preserve the union’, Lincoln had to lead a war of aggression to invade, conquer and annex the independent nations of the CSA, thus causing the government of the people, by the people, for the people of those nations to perish from the earth.

After the war, the USA became a single nation comprised of subservient sud-divisions called states. The Founders, at the Philadelphia (Constitutional) Convention created an alliance or federation of nations composed of independent nation-states, and they created a central federal, not national, government to legislate only over those express and limited issues that effected them all and over which they desired uniformity for the common good. They never considered surrendering their individual autonomy and independence to a nation government and to be subsumed in a single nation. They had fought too hard for their independence to squander it so easily and foolishly, especially after the abysmal failure of their first treaty of alliance, The Articles of Confederation. In fact, when New York, Rhode Island and Virginia included the express right to secede in their accessions to the constitution, delegates from the other states (translated “nation-states) told them the reservations were unnecessary because the right was a given, implicit in Article IV and later protected further by Amendments IX and X. Lincoln knew all of that.

The nation that Lincoln and the federal forces brought into being in 1865 is the very monolithic government the Founders tried so hard to avoid and prevent. Will you find that in your text? No, history was rewritten by the victors after 1865. Is it true? If you bother to do the research, the conclusion is inescapable (especially if the lofty ideals of the Declaration of Independence are to be given any credence whatsoever).

Although my initial answer was less than accurate history (for a question so basic, why help someone too lazy to punch a couple keys to find more legitimate information?), it is no less inaccurate than the mythology that passes itself of as “history” in the texts written by the victors after the conquest and annexation of the nations of the South.

Abraham Lincoln and Civil War?
what was it about Abraham Lincoln’s character that made him the best man for the job ahead of him ( Civil War )

Answer by gayle g
Mr. Lincoln understood the problem of public opinion. “Lincoln never attempted to propose what was more than one step ahead of the great body of political public opinion. But he always led the way.” wrote historian Harry V. Jaffa in Crisis in the House Divided.8 “Our government,’ Lincoln said before the Dred Scott decision, ‘rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much. But public opinion, according to Lincoln, was not essentially or primarily opinion on a long list of individual topics, such as James G. Randall has enumerated, nor was it the kind of thing that the Gallup poll attempts to measure. ‘Public opinion, on any subject,’ said Lincoln, ‘always has a ‘central idea’ from which all its minor thoughts radiate.’ And the ‘central idea in our political public opinion, at the beginning was, and until recently has continued to be ‘the equality of men.’”9

Lincoln chronicler Herbert Mitgang wrote: “The record of his utterances discloses that Lincoln not only spoke up but voted against slavery when it was unpopular to do so — and that he did so from his beginning in public office. At the age of twenty-eight, as an elected representative in the Illinois General Assembly, he stood on principle against the Southern sympathizers in the state legislature. When a unanimous Senate and almost every member of the House approved rigid resolutions declaring the right of slaveholding sacred, even in the District of Columbia itself, only two state representatives went on record in protest — Dan Stone and A. Lincoln.”10

Paul Simon, who served as an Illinois Senator in the late 20th Century, concluded in his study of Mr. Lincoln’s actions in the State Legislature: “The significance of Lincoln’s votes on slavery can be summed up in a word ‘growth.’ He came from a family which was opposed to slavery, but did not get excited about the issue. Lincoln tended to accept that family attitude; he was not a crusader on the issue. But gradually, session by session, he became a little more concerned and a little more courageous.”11

Growth is indeed a word often used to describe Mr. Lincoln’s position on race and slavery in a state which had little sympathy for ex-slaves even if it had little support for slavery. Mr. Lincoln neither grew up in nor lived in a racially tolerant society. “There were black laws in Illinois indeed — laws that denied the Negro the vote and deprived him of other rights. Illinois in those days was a Jim Crow state. That was where Lincoln had spent most of the years of his manhood, among people who had migrated from slave country farther south, as he himself had done. Naturally he had shared some of the negrophobic feeling of his neighbors in Kentucky, in southern Indiana, in central Illinois. That was where, in geography, and in sentiment, he came from,” wrote historian Richard N. Current. “But he did not stay there. The most remarkable thing about him was his tremendous power of growth. He grew in sympathy, in the breadth of his humaneness, as he grew in other aspects of the mind and spirit. In more ways than one he succeeded in breaking through the narrow bounds of his early environment.”12

Bloomington resident Robert H. Brown heard Mr. Lincoln say in a speech in 1854: “The slavery question often bothered me as far bar back as 1836-40. I was troubled and grieved over it; but after the annexation of Texas I gave it up, believing as I now do, that God will settle it, and settle it right, and that he will, in some inscrutable way, restrict the spread of so great an evil; but for the present it is our duty to wait.”13

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