Civil+War+and+Spirit+of+Compromise

failure to follow directions will negatively impact your grade WGR- In Boorstin's __The Civil War and the Spirit of Compromise__, he correctly identifies the true cause of the civil war and supports his arguments with ample evidence. However, Boorstin used generalizations such as when he mentions Calhoun's idea of restoration not revolution. Calhoun is pictured as a man who wants to restore the government but in reality he put forth the Ordinance of Nullification, which is more revolutionary than anything else. Besides his generalizations, Boorstin convincingly spells out how the beliefs of different areas of America brought about sectionalism, the Civil War, and compromise over many parts of the government. Another interesting point Boorstin elaborates on is how northerners and southerners had major differences when it came to interpreting the constitution and how each side manipulated its meaning slightly to benefit themselves. With great objectivity, Boorstin leaves many questions such as whether the north or south was right on the meaning of the constitution.

week one
Bonus Week: JML: The Civil War, of America, was vastly different from other civil wars because both sides fought to maintain politics as they saw them. The North and the South each thought themselves as defenders rather than revolutionaries of American politics, aside from a few extremists on either side. The North claimed to aim to uphold American government, namely the Declaration of Independence, that asserted men as being equal, thus they did not wish to alter the government but rather uphold it. The South believed in the Constitution, the right to property, the rights of the few against the majority, and balanced power; therefore, they too only wanted to further how they saw the American government and did not want to uproot it either. Both sides thought they were the ones who truly wanted America to be the America the founding fathers had designed. Unlike other civil wars, the Civil War was not a war for drastic change or the overthrow of an oppressive government. On the contrary, the opposing factions fought to prevent what they saw as radical alterations in politics and correct past deviations from the government’s foundation. The Civil War was not the ‘Second American Revolution,’ it was not fought by radicals to gain independence from a tyrannical government. The South wanted independence from the North because it felt that the North no longer stayed true to real American ideals, therefore the Civil War is very different from the American Revolution. Unlike the American Revolution, neither the North nor the South wanted to destroy a governmental system they saw as unfair. Neither was against America ideals, they simply defined them differently. Because the North and the South both were fighting for staying true to American ideals, not going against them, the Civil War was very different from other civil wars.