Question/Problem 3: How did ideas and events contribute to the conflict between North and South?

William Seward was a Senator from New York when he made the following predictions in a speech in 1858. Read the excerpts from that speech and answer the questions that follow.

Our country is a theater, which exhibits, in full operation, two radically different political systems, the one resting on the basis of servile or slave labor, the other on the basis of voluntary labor of freemen....

The two systems are at once perceived to be incongruous [unrelated]. But they are more than incongruous--they are incompatible. They never have permanently existed together in one country, and they never can....

Hitherto, the two systems have existed in different States, but side by side within the American Union. This has happened because the Union is a confederation of States. But in another aspect the United States constitute only one nation. Increase of population, which is filling the States out to their very borders, together with a new and extended network of railroads and other avenues, and an internal commerce which daily becomes more intimate [closely related], is rapidly bringing the States into a higher and more perfect social unity of consolidation. Thus, these antagonistic systems are continually coming into closer contact, and collision results. Shall I tell you what this collision means? They who think that is accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested and fanatical agitators, and therefore ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave holding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation. Either the cotton and rice fields of South Carolina and the sugar plantations of Louisiana will ultimately be tilled by free labor, and Charleston and New Orleans become marts for legitimate merchandise alone, or else the rye fields and wheat fields of Massachusetts and New York must again be surrendered by their farmers to slave culture and to the production of slaves, and Boston and New York become once more markets for trade in the bodies and souls of men. It is the failure to apprehend this great truth that induces so many unsuccessful attempts at final compromise between the slave and free States, and it is the existence of this great fact that renders all such pretended compromises, when made, vain and ephemeral....

From Eyewitnesses and Others--Readings in American History, vol. 1, pp. 358-361.

1. According to William Seward, what are the two systems of labor in the United States?

2. How does he view the two systems of labor? Why?

3. Seward believes the country is on a collision course. Discuss three examples he gives to justify this belief.

4. What part does he believe compromise will play in the final result.

5. How might these ideas contribute to the conflict between the North and the South?