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The roots of the Civil War run deep in the American
past. Those roots were intimately tied to the
institution of slavery.
Slavery had been controversial in North America ever since
English colonists began importing Africans in large
numbers in the late seventeenth century. Many
people turned against the institution as they learned of
the transoceanic slave trade, or the brutal system of
gang labor on the plantation. Yet, no one could
deny the system’s profitability. Even those
British North American colonies above the Chesapeake
benefited enormously from the institution, since their economies
largely centered on trade with the various West Indies
sugar-producing islands.
Concerned
with the ideals of the Declaration of
Independence, America’s Revolutionary generation tried
to put slavery on the road to ultimate extinction.
Congress criminalized the African slave trade after
1808, and tried to seal off the institution’s growth
above the Ohio River line to the west (the Northwest
Ordinance). In addition, states without the plantation
system experimented with gradual emancipation laws.
Yet, again, few could ignore slavery’s ability to
generate wealth, particularly when Eli Whitney’s cotton
gin promised to spread a profitable plantation
agriculture all the way to the Mississippi. So, slavery
and the internal slave trade expanded, and became
central to the economic growth of the new United States.
During the
colonial period slavery was legal everywhere, and
self-evidently important to every colony’s economy.
The benefits, and problems, of slavery were distributed
more or less evenly throughout British North America.
However, in 1820 the United States Congress passed
legislation known as the Missouri Compromise, that
created the visible image of a geographic separation
between free and slave territories and states. The
long-standing controversy over slavery became a
sectional debate between a supposedly free North and a
slave South.
In 1854
Congress deepened this conflict by passing the
Kansas-Nebraska Act, that permitted the introduction of
slaves into these two territories carved out of the
Louisiana Purchase. Because Congress earlier had
designated this area to be free territory (the
Compromise of 1820), the act generated a passionate
outrage in the North. Overnight, a new political
organization was born—the Republican Party—whose major
object was to prevent slavery’s further expansion west.
Because this new party won heavy majorities in the New
England, the mid-Atlantic, and the northern Midwestern
states in various elections, it created for the first
time the prospect of a politically united North.
The plantation states
could not afford to allow this party to become too
powerful. Heavily outnumbered by the North in
population, and lagging well behind in growth potential,
the slaveholding states were alarmed by the growing
strength of a purely sectional political party that had
the capacity to capture control of the major
institutions of government without one vote from a slave
state resident. Throughout the remainder of the 1850s,
the slavery controversy continued. Bleeding Kansas, the LeCompton Constitution, the Dred Scott Case, and John
Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry ripped away at
possibilities for compromise, leaving behind increasing
bitterness, mistrust and anger. Then, in 1860, Abraham
Lincoln, the Republican candidate for president, won
election in an incredible four-way race. Even though he
won only 39% of the popular vote, he took the Electoral
College handily because of his party’s majority strength
in Northern states. Upon learning the results of this
election, South Carolina—long known as a radical
Southern state—seceded from the Union. The Cotton
Belt
states of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and
Texas soon followed.
For more
information on the years leading up to the war:
Timeline
and Resources
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