American History Questions and Answers

Question One

In his speech ‘Liberty and Union’, Daniel Webster opposes the argument that states can
nullify federal laws that displease them. He provides many arguments against the Nullification
Doctrine. First, he argues that the federal government is a creature of the people and not the
states. It is, therefore, controlled by the will of the people and not the will of the states. The
states, he argues, are also a creation of the people but they have different powers from those of
the federal government. The federal government derives its powers from the constitution which
is the supreme law of the land. Thus, the federal government is derives its powers from a
superior law compared to state governments. According to Webster, since the states do not create
the federal government and are derive their powers from a less superior law they have no powers
to interfere with the laws of the federal government.
South Carolina takes a different view. In its Ordinance of Nullification, South Carolina
argues that the federal government is a creature of the states. The states, therefore, have a right to
interfere with the laws of the federal government. This interference includes nullification of
federal laws that they believe do not act in their interests.
I think that Daniel Webster’s argument is the superior of the two. If states are allowed to
disregard federal laws then, the federal government is going to weaken over time and it may
reach a point where the federal government is too weak to be effective. As the Founding Fathers

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realized in the 1780s, a weak federal government leads to a generally weak country. Moreover, if
states are able to impose their will on the federal government, then the federal government ceases
to be a representative of the people as democracy requires.
Question Two

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required that slaves who had escaped from their masters
were supposed to be returned to them even if they had run away to a non-slave holding state. In
the two cartoons shown, Southerners feel that the protests of Northerners against the Fugitive
Slave Act are hypocritical. According to Southerners, slaves were their property. Thus, in
requiring that their escaped slaves be returned they were simply requesting for their property to
be returned just the same way Northerners (in the second cartoon) often came to the south
looking for their stolen property.
The two 1851 political cartoons are a continuation of the arguments presented by South
Carolina and Daniel Webster. In this instance, however, the federal laws are in favor of the
slave-holding south. Even though northern states did not like the Fugitive Slave Act they had no
powers to nullify them.
The issue of slavery also features prominently in the 1856 political cartoon. In the
cartoon, Kansas is seen crying for help as the four presidential nominees of the Democratic Party
force it to swallow a black man. The implication is that the Democratic Party was trying to force
Kansas to be a slaveholding state against its will. The cartoon was made in the wake of Kansas-
Nebraska Act which required states, and not the federal government, to decide whether they
would be free or slave-holding when entering the Union. According to the cartoon, Democratic
Party, using the Kansas-Nebraska Act was forcing Kansas to enter the Union as a slave state.

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As the Kansas-Nebraska Act reveals, the slavery issue greatly complicated westward
expansion in the 1840s and 1850s. The expansion turned into a supremacy battle between free
northern states and slave-holding southern states. If western states entered the Union as free then
they would tip the balance of power to the north and vice versa. Thus, what would have ideally
been a simple search for opportunities westward turned into a battle regarding the future of
slavery.

Question Three

The Dredd Scott decision greatly empowered the pro-slavery movement. In Dredd Scott
v. Sanford, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had no powers to restrict the
expansion of slavery in the Union. This was a major boost to pro-slavery states which had argued
that restriction of slavery expansion was an attack on property rights and a means of weakening
southern states. Apart from restricting federal government from acting against expansion of
slavery, the decision also held that African Americans were racially inferior to whites and that
they held no citizenship rights whether as slaves or as free men.
The ruling was against the arguments that had been made by anti-slavery activists for
long. In his 1852 speech “The Meaning of Fourth of July for the Negro”, Frederick Douglas,
notes glaring inconsistencies between the state of African Americans and the values that Fourth
of July represents. The Fourth of July is the day when Declaration of Independence was made.
The declaration, which marked a break between the United States and Britain, was made in the
name of freedom and natural rights. The ensuing American War of Independence was fought to
defend the rights of Americans which they felt Britain denied them. Having fought on the
principle that all men are created equal, Douglass feels that the institution of slavery was against
that principle because it denied African Americans rights as men and treated them as inferior to

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other men when the Declaration had clearly stated that “all men are created equal”. By ruling that
African Americans were inferior and, therefore, lacked citizenship rights, the Dredd Scott
decision challenged the arguments of Frederick Douglass.
Question Four

In his 1858 speech titled “On the Irrepressible Conflict”, William H. Seward argues that
the totally opposite institutions of the North and the South were bound to have a socioeconomic
collision. According to him, Northern institutions were based on free labor while Southern
institutions were based on slave labor. In his view, free labor was infinitely superior to slave
labor. While slave labor debased the man who toiled, free labor improved his social, moral, and
physical condition. Moreover, slave labor system was wasteful since a lot of man-hours were
spent making sure that the slave did his work. Such man-hours, Seward argues, would better be
spent on more productive activities.
The anti-slavery arguments of William H. Seward were certainly not shared by
Alexander Stephens. In his 1861 “Cornerstone Speech”, Alexander Stephen, the Vice President
of the Confederate States, defends the institution of slavery in racial terms. He argues that
African Americans are not equal to whites; they are inferior to them. The institution of slavery is,
therefore, justified based on this perceived inferiority of African Americans. He also cites the
Bible as justifying enslavement of an inferior people. In his view, the Confederacy is the first
government that is founded on the principle that whites are superior to African Americans.
Lincoln doe not share these racial views of Alexander Stephens. In his 1963 Gettysburg
Address, Lincoln makes an argument for continued Northern sacrifices in the Civil War that was
then raging. In his view, the war was being fought to defend the principle that ‘all men are
created equal’. Thus, Lincol explicitly argues that the principle of white superiority, which

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slavery was based upon, was not valid. By making this argument, Lincoln makes the case that
the Civil War was fought on a moral issue and not economic or political interests.

Question Five

I do not think that states should have the powers to nullify federal laws if they disagree
with them. The Supreme law upon which the federal government acts upon is the constitution.
Thus, a federal law can only be nullified if it is found that it has violated the constitution. The
institution that determines whether such violation has been made or not is the Supreme Court and
federal courts, not states. Thus, states have no powers to nullify any law made by the federal
government. Moreover, were state governments to cherry-pick which laws to follow and which
ones to ignore, the United States will cease to exist as a United federal country because the states
will in effect have a veto power over the federal government and the US will become like the
U.N’s Security Council- generally weak and ineffective.
Even though the issue of nullification has not featured prominently in the American
political scene since the end of the Civil War, I think the crisis generated by Brown v. Board of
Education in 1954 had the potential of generating serious calls for nullification. Many Southern
states opposed the desegregation of schools ordered by the Supreme Court and sought to have
the ruling overturned on the basis that it violated states rights. It is good that the nullification
efforts did not succeed. Had nullification succeeded, the US would still remain a racially divided
country. Moreover, it would have set precedent where the federal government would be unable
to offer leadership on important matters such as civil rights, women rights, and rights related to
sexuality issues.