In March 1861, when Abraham Lincoln took the oath as the sixteenth president of the United States, the country had been struggling with the question of slavery for years. Kansas was bleeding from it, laws had been broken over it and in early February, seven southern states had finally seceded because of it and formed the Confederate States of America. In Kansas, pro-slavery and anti-slavery partisans engaged in a bloody war for control of the territorial …showed first 75 words of 1071 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1071 total…unity once the election was over and the threat of succession greater. During the decades leading up to the Civil War, the issue of slavery in the United States increasingly became intertwined in the growing sectional divide between North and South, between free and slave states. Ultimately, all attempts at compromise failed and it would take America’s bloodiest and most divisive war to settle the slavery question and prevent the United States from disunion.