A few months later, on March 21, 1861, Alexander Stephens, now vice-president of the Confederates, stopped his Cornerstone Speech in Savannah, Georgia. In his speech, he notes that slavery was at the root of the secessionist crisis and describes the main differences between Confederal ideology and American ideology: in Kansas around 1855, the issue of slavery reached a condition of unbearable tension and violence. But this happened in a region where an overwhelming part of the settlers were only land-hungry Westerners, indifferent to public issues. The majority of the inhabitants were not concerned about sectional tensions or the issue of slavery. Instead, the tension began in Kansas as a dispute between rival plaintiffs. During the first wave of settlements, no one held titles on the ground, and the settlers rushed to occupy newly opened lands, which were suitable for cultivation. While tensions and violence emerged as patterns between Yankee and Missourian settlers, there is little evidence of ideological divisions on issues of slavery. Instead, the Missouri plaintiffs, who considered Kansas their own domain, viewed the Yankee Squatters as intruders, while the Yankees accused the Malourians of conquering the best country without doing so honestly. In 1819, New York Congressman James Tallmadge Jr. caused a riot in the South by proposing two amendments to a bill that brought Missouri into the Union as a free state. The first slaves banned from transfer to Missouri, and the second would free all Missouri slaves born after being admitted to the Union at the age of 25. [19] With the admission of Alabama in 1819, the United States was divided equally with 11 slave states and 11 free states.
The accession of the new state of Missouri as a slave state would give the slave states a majority in the Senate; The Tallmadge amendment would give a majority to the free states. To a lesser extent, the northern press must accept its share of guilt for denigrating the countries of the South and condemning them as brutal torturers and heartless family separators. As all this went back and forth at least the decade before the war, until hostilities broke out, few people in the north or south had many advantages for each other, and the heads were laid. An older Tennessean said later: “I wish there was a kilometer of a wide river between North and South, which would burn forever with indelible rage, and that it could never pass through any living being in the infinite eras of eternity.” Historians debating the origins of the American Civil War focus on why seven southern states (followed by four more after the war began) explained their secession from the United States (of the Union), why they regrouped with the Confederate States of America (simply known as “Confederation”) and why the North refused to let them go.