Deadlock and a Deepening Crisis

2020 ◽  
pp. 165-191
Author(s):  
William L. Barney

Congressional efforts to quell secession through a sectional compromise collapsed in December. As Northerners debated ways to deal with secession, President James Buchanan, a Democrat who had long sympathized with Southern grievances, lost credibility on both sides when he declared secession to be an unconstitutional act that he was powerless to put down. Following the departure of House members from the Lower South and South Carolina’s secession on December 20, a Senate committee proposed the Crittenden Compromise, a package of constitutional amendments guaranteeing the protection of slavery, including the recognition of slavery in all present and future territories south of the Missouri Compromise line of 36° 30'. Lincoln emphatically rejected the territorial feature on the expansion of slavery, and the Republicans backed him by scuttling the compromise. At the same time, the governors in the Lower South denounced the surprise move by Major Robert Anderson of his federal garrison from the vulnerable Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter in the Charleston harbor as a hostile act portending a new aggressive federal policy against secession. In what amounted to de facto secession, the governors ordered the seizure of federal forts and possessions in their states. War over Fort Sumter was averted when Buchanan and the South Carolina governor agreed to maintain the status quo in the wake of the firing on a poorly planned relief effort to resupply the fort.

Author(s):  
William L. Barney

Rebels in the Making narrates and interprets secession in the fifteen slave states in 1860–1861. It is a political history informed by the socioeconomic structures of the South and the varying forms they took across the region. It explains how a small minority of Southern radicals exploited the hopes and fears of Southern whites over slavery after Lincoln’s election in November of 1860 to create and lead a revolutionary movement with broad support, especially in the Lower South. It reveals a divided South in which the commitment to secession was tied directly to the extent of slave ownership and the political influence of local planters. White fears over the future of slavery were at the center of the crisis, and the refusal of Republicans to sanction the expansion of slavery doomed efforts to reach a sectional compromise. In January 1861, six states in the Lower South joined South Carolina in leaving the Union, and delegates from the seceded states organized a Confederate government in February. Lincoln’s call for troops to uphold the Union after the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861 finally pushed the reluctant states of the Upper South to secede in defense of slavery and white supremacy.


1984 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. Van Wingen

In his classic, Southern Politics, Key used the term “one-party factionalism” to describe the electoral politics of the South during the 1930s and 1940s: “one-party” because the Republicans offered, at best, only minimal opposition to the Democrats, and “factional” because several groups tended to vie for control of the top state offices via electoral victories in the Democratic primaries. According to Key, severe consequences accompanied one-party factionalism. In most of the southern states, primary voters could not even vote the “ins” out of office, for the competing factions were so fluid that it was never clear who, if anyone, represented the ins. The haves in southern society normally controlled government; although those in power had their differences, particularly in style, most of them agreed that the status quo needed protection. The less privileged lacked organized avenues for expressing their needs.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (21) ◽  
pp. 9053
Author(s):  
Qingchang Li ◽  
Seungkook Roh ◽  
Jin Won Lee

The current South Korean government headed by President Moon Jae-in has put a great deal of effort into electricity mix reform by pushing forward the phasing out of coal and nuclear power and the expansion of natural gas and new renewable energy in the country’s electricity generation processes. Noting the importance of understanding public responses to energy policy, the present study segmented the South Korean public according to their preferred direction for electricity mix reform using a nationwide sample. Through a series of latent class analyses, we extracted four distinct segments: Gradual Reformists, Drastic Reformists, Selective Gradual Reformists, and Status-quo Seekers. Overall, apart from the Status-quo Seekers segment (8.75%), support for the transition from coal and nuclear power to natural gas and new renewable energy seems to be the prevailing opinion of the Korean public. However, the degree of such preferences varies across the segments. In addition, regardless of the segment, the South Korean public generally seems to categorize the energy sources in a manner consistent with the underlying framework of the government’s electricity mix reform: they tend to treat coal and nuclear power similarly and natural gas and new renewable energy similarly.


Author(s):  
Gerd-Rainer Horn

Much attention has been rightfully devoted to the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944 and—less so—the Allied landing on the Mediterranean coastline. This chapter focuses on the contribution by antifascist resistance activists to the liberation of France. It is often overlooked that much of Southern France south of the Loire and Lake Geneva was liberated to a significant extent by resistance units. Obviously, without the engagements responsible for the liberation of the Northern half of France by Allied troops, the resistance would not have been able to carry this out. Still, the liberation of roughly half of France by resistance groups had major consequences for the plans of French antifascists for post-liberation society. The most significant acts of defiance of the smooth return to the status quo ante bellum occurred precisely in those areas where the resistance had been largely responsible for the expulsion of German troops.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 83-91
Author(s):  
Başaran AYAR

Turkey and Iran have maintained stable relations for decades and established cooperation by exploring their common interests despite many political disputes, ideological differences, or economic competition. But recently, many emerging disagreements of the two neighbors started to test the breaking point of this longtime balance. Today, Ankara and Tehran are trying to get a better hand against each other through diplomatic, military, and economic instruments. Starting by presenting an overview of Turkish-Iranian relations, this article focuses on the main points of friction between the two actors in the South Caucasus and Central Asia. The region is going through a critical juncture with crucial events such as the Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020 and the aftermaths of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. So far, Turkey has increased its regional influence by strengthening its economic and diplomatic presence and establishing military cooperation. This target is pursued through the Turkic identity, which provides the ideological basis for Ankara’s regional strategy. The Islamic Republic of Iran, on the other hand, is trying to defend the regional status quo to resist the containment strategy and international isolation that it has been facing since the revolution. The “axis of resistance” idea that Iran pursues, especially in the Middle East, is almost nonexistent in the Central Asian and Caucasian region due to the Russian factor, lack of sympathy to such an approach on the part of the regional actors, and the Regime’s reluctance to change the status quo in its Northern and Eastern borders. In addition to Ankara and Tehran’s competing regional desires, several bilateral problems to solve in energy, trade, security, and migration management put the actors on the opposing sides. The study claims that the incompatibility between the actors’ regional strategies increases to the point that their rivalry in the Middle East will expand to Central Asia and the Caucasian region. But in contrast to this slow process, there are imminent common issues that can only be solved by a joint effort by Turkey and Iran, and this necessity will restrain the damages of this incompatibility on bilateral relations.


2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Babasile D. Osunyomi ◽  
Sara S. Grobbelaar

Background:With an estimated 12.2% of its population infected in 2012, South Africa has the highest percentage of people living with the human immunodeficiency virus and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) in the world. Although the mortality rate of the epidemic is decreasing, it has adverse impacts on the socio-economic development status and human capital of South Africa.Objective: The key aim of this article is to explore the status quo of the implementation of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in selected intervention programmes in the South African HIV/AIDS care delivery value chain. The contribution of this article is the mapping of key intervention activities along an HIV care value chain and to suggest a roadmap towards the integration of ICTs in service delivery programmes.Method: 20 managers of HIV/AIDS intervention programmes were surveyed, followed by semi-structured in-depth interviews with these respondents. A further five in-depth interviews were conducted with experts in the ICT area for exploring the uses of and barriers to integrating ICTs in the HIV/AIDS care delivery value chain.Results: The researchers mapped the barriers to implementation and ICT tools utilised within the HIV/AIDS care delivery value chain, which proves to be a useful tool to explore the status quo of technology in such service delivery programmes. The researchers then considered the wider policy environment and provided a roadmap based on the analysis and the South Africa eHealth strategy for driving development in this sector.Conclusion: The authors found that South Africa’s eHealth environment is still nascent and that the South African eHealth strategy does not place enough emphasis on systems integration and stakeholder engagement or the planning and process of uptake of ICTs by target audiences.


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