Prompt: Frederick Douglass once said, If there is no struggle, there is not progress.

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both
moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. He was right. Progress is something
that must be fought for; without conflict, progress simply does not occur.
Assignment: Does progress result only from struggle and conflict? Plan and write an
essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position
Response:
Progress does not come with complacency, but with action. It requires
something to be struggled against and to be changed. For if there is nothing to
change, why change it? Without some debatable issue to be debated, or some
controversial issue for a controversy to arise about, there would be no progress;
without conflict, there can be no progress.
Slavery was a highly controversial issue during the 1800s up to the end of the
Civil War. The southern states clung dearly to their peculiar institution, for they
relied heavily on it for their cotton-driven economy. However, the moral issue of
slavery loomed over the institution from the northern states, causing the southern
states to secede from the Union and establish the Confederacy, where slavery was
allowed. However, President Lincoln decided to reunify the Union and keep the
misbehaving South in line by declaring the Civil War. Through several years of hard
fighting and many, many lives lost, the Confederates were defeated and the moral
sin of slavery obliterated in the US. Through this struggle and many more during the
Civil Rights Movements during the 1900s, African Americans were able to rise from
their position as slaves to full-fledged citizens of the US. However, without these
struggles, slavery would still exist in America, as there wouldnt never have been a
push against slavery that would have uninstitutionalized it by law. Therefore,
without the physical struggle of the Civil War and the moral conflicts of the Civil
Rights Movements, African Americans could not have progressed from slaves to
citizens.
The American Revolution was another struggle in which only conflict could
have brought about change. If the Revolution had not happened, democracy would
nave have been seeded in the brand new nation of the United States because it
would have remained a colony under monarchical rule. Without the complete
removal of a monarchs power from the political system of the US, we would never
have been forced to develop the system of democracy that we live under today.
Therefore, without the physical struggle of the American Revolution, our political
system would never have progressed from a monarchy to a democracy.
The examples of the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement bringing about
progress for African Americans and the American Revolution enacting progress or
out nations political system show that without struggle, progress would not occur. If
there is nothing to struggle against there is nothing to progress in.