What Constitutional Issues Were in Dispute During the Civil essays

What Constitutional Issues Were in Dispute During the Civil essays Leading up to and throughout the Civil War, many issues were in dispute. These issues became increasingly important to the United States unity. Slavery was abolished and the Union began to come together. The South felt the need for Slavery and therefore ignited a war between Americans. The ending of the Civil War brought hope to African Americans and to the Nation. One of the most important and controversial decisions in American history was the Dred Scott vs. Sanford case. In March of 1857, the United States Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, declared that all blacks, slaves as well as free, were not and could never become citizens of the United States. Dred Scott, a slave who had lived in the free state of Illinois and the free territory of Wisconsin before moving back to the slave state of Missouri, had appealed to the Supreme Court in hopes of being granted his freedom. Taney, a loyal supporter of slavery who also had the intent on protecting southerners from northern aggression, wrote in the Court's majority opinion that, because Scott was black, he was not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue. The framers of the Constitution, he wrote, believed that blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He w as bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it." Although disappointed, Frederick Douglass, found a bright side to the decision and announced, "my hopes were never brighter than now." For Douglass, the decision would bring slavery to the attention of the nation and was a step toward slavery's ultimate destruction. In 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected president in on of the nations most significant elections. The issue of slavery was finally brought up and a controversy was created. The Southern st ...

The Parts of a Word

The Parts of a Word The Parts of a Word The Parts of a Word By Maeve Maddox A reader asks about the terms prefix, root, and suffix, and wonders how to distinguish them in a word. At the most basic level, words are made up of units of meaning called morphemes. A morpheme may be a recognizable word like tree, run, or button that cannot be broken down into smaller meaningful parts. A morpheme can represent meaning without being a word. For example, the prefix un- expresses the idea of negation. The suffix -ness, used to turn adjectives into abstract nouns, is a morpheme. The root struct, seen in structure and construct, is a morpheme that embodies the meaning of â€Å"to build,† but it cannot stand alone as an English word. A root is a word’s basic part and carries its fundamental meaning. In the word sadness, for example, the root is sad. Sometimes two roots combine to make one word, as in telephone, a combination of the morpheme tele, which relates to distance, and the morpheme phone, which relates to sound. Prefixes and suffixes belong to a set of morphemes called affixes. An affix is an element added to the base form or stem of a word to modify its meaning. Standard English makes use of two types of affix: prefixes and suffixes. A prefix is added at the beginning of a word. For example, the prefix re- is added to a root or a word to denote the idea of doing it again: return, renew, reconstruct. A suffix is added at the end of a word. Suffixes are of two kinds, derivational and inflectional. A derivational suffix changes the underlying meaning of the word; an inflectional suffix changes the tense of a verb or the number of a noun, or performs some other grammatical purpose. Some common derivational suffixes are, -er, -al, -ful, and -ize. The suffix -er added to a verb creates a person or object that performs the action of the verb: teach/teacher, walk/walker, kill/killer, compute/computer; -al and -ful change nouns into adjectives: accident/accidental, forget/forgetful; -ize changes a noun into a verb: terror/terrorize. Common inflectional suffixes are endings such as, –ed, -ly, -s, -s, -er, -ed, -es, -est, and -ing. Derivational endings are added to a root. For example, the word reconstruction is made up of the root struct, two prefixes, re- and con-, and a suffix, tion. (Because struct ends in t and tion begins with t, one of the ts had to go.) Inflectional endings are added to a stem, which is the entire word that the ending is being added to. In the words reconstructed and reconstructing, for example, the stem is reconstruct-. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Grammar 101 category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:100 Exquisite AdjectivesPrecedent vs. PrecedenceDouble Possessive