OPINION:
A debate over what started the Civil War has been a hot topic in the past week after former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley was asked about it at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire. President Biden jumped in on the discussion and tweeted, “It was about slavery.”
My response to Mr. Biden’s post was simple: “Democrats wanted to expand slavery into the western territories. Republicans opposed it.”
Not surprisingly, a reporter from PolitiFact reached out to rate my post. The facts are clear: Tensions between people in the Northern and Southern states had been growing for decades. Slavery was at the center of the debate.
In the North, much of the economy was driven by manufacturing and industry, with a limited number of smaller farms. In the South, much of the economy was driven by large plantations, particularly cotton and tobacco plantations. These landowners were dependent on slaves.
In 1854, a Democrat from Illinois, Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, introduced legislation that created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. Democratic-controlled majorities in Congress passed the bill, and Democratic President Franklin Pierce signed it into law. The Kansas-Nebraska Act effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and allowed the spread of slavery to the Western territories.
On March 20, 1854, a group of anti-slavery activists who opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act met in a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin. There, they founded the Republican Party, which opposed the expansion of slavery into the Western territories.
On Nov. 6, 1860, Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected president. Before he even took office, seven Southern states seceded from the United States. Southern Democrats led the charge to form the Confederacy.
Lincoln took office in March 1861. On April 12, after the new president ordered a fleet to bring supplies to Fort Sumter, South Carolina, the first shots of the Civil War were fired by Confederate forces. Four more Southern states joined their efforts. The president and vice president of the Confederacy had previously served in office as Democrats.
Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Sept. 22, 1862. It went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, and set free all slaves in the rebellious Confederate states.
Near the end of the war, on April 8, 1864, Lincoln and his allies worked with a Republican-led Congress to pass the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. Once ratified by the states, it permanently banned slavery.
Republicans subsequently passed the 14th Amendment, which provided former slaves with citizenship and civil rights, and the 15th Amendment, which banned states from prohibiting citizens from voting based on race. The states ratified each of the amendments to the Constitution.
This is an important issue to me. Anti-slavery activists started the Republican Party in my home state. Over 91,000 soldiers from Wisconsin fought in the Civil War, and more than 12,000 gave their lives to help end slavery.
Three regiments from Wisconsin served in the Iron Brigade — the 2nd Wisconsin, 6th Wisconsin and 7th Wisconsin. They took major losses at the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863. Tonette and I later took our sons to that battlefield to honor their sacrifice.
President Abraham Lincoln stated it so clearly during the dedication of Soldiers’ National Cemetery on Nov. 19, 1863:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.
“It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Ultimately, the Civil War was about freedom, and the newly founded Republican Party helped secure that victory.
• Scott Walker is president of Young America’s Foundation and served as the 45th governor of Wisconsin.
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