Frances Clalin Clayton was born in Illinois in the 1830s, a time when Americans were starting to experience the tension between Northern and Southern morals on slavery. This stark contrast of moral values was mostly due to the circumstances of the time. The North was beginning to become a capitalist industrial nation, while the South still relied on slaves and agriculture for their economy. The North did not have much to lose by giving up slavery, whereas the South had their entire economic structure at stake. Additionally, there had been a long-standing feud between Federalists who advocated for more national government regulation and Anti-Federalists who advocated for more state government regulation.

 

    The sentiment in the South tended to be that national government favored the North because of the industrialist economy and didn’t take the interests of the South into account. This sentiment was only aggravated by the election of Republican Candidate Abraham Lincoln, whose values tended to align more with the Northern way of thinking. Thus beginning the biggest inward conflict in American history, which understandably engaged most of its citizens from all backgrounds.