What Caused Slavery to Become an Important Part of Southern Life Again
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The role of slavery in bringing on the Civil State of war has been hotly debated for decades. One of import mode of approaching the issue is to await at what contemporary observers had to say. In March 1861, Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States of America, gave his view:
The new [Amalgamated] constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar establishment — African slavery every bit it exists amongst us — the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate crusade of the late rupture and present revolution . . . The prevailing ideas entertained by . . . most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the sometime constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. . . Those ideas, yet, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the supposition of . . . the equality of races. This was an fault . . .
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite thought; its foundations are laid, its corner–stone rests upon the not bad truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.
— Alexander H. Stephens, March 21, 1861, reported in the Savannah Republican, emphasis in the original
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Today, most professional person historians agree with Stephens that slavery and the status of African Americans were at the centre o the crisis that plunged the U.South. into a ceremonious war from 1861 to 1865. That is non to say that the boilerplate Confederate soldier fought to preserve slavery or that the North went to war to finish slavery. Soldiers fight for many reasons — notably to stay alive and back up their comrades in arms — and the North's goal in the offset was preservation of the Wedlock, not emancipation. For the 200,000 African Americans who ultimately served the U.Southward. in the war, emancipation was the principal aim.
The roots of the crisis over slavery that gripped the nation in 1860–1861 go back to the nation's founding. European settlers brought a system of slavery with them to the western hemisphere in the 1500s. Unable to find cheap labor from other sources, white settlers increasingly turned to slaves imported from Africa. Past the early 1700s in British North America, slavery meant African slavery. Southern plantations using slave labor produced the slap-up consign crops — tobacco, rice, wood products, and indigo — that made the American colonies profitable. Many Northern merchants made their fortunes either in the slave trade or by exporting the products of slave labor. African slavery was primal to the development of British North America.
Although slavery existed in all 13 colonies at the offset of the American Revolution in 1775, a number of Americans (especially those of African descent) sensed the contradiction between the Declaration of Independence'southward ringing claim of man equality and the existence of slavery. Reacting to that contradiction, the Northern states decided to phase out slavery following the Revolution. The hereafter of slavery in the South was debated, and some held out the hope that it would eventually disappear in that location as well.
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When the U.S. Constitution was written in 1787, however, the interests of slaveholders and those who profited from slavery could not be ignored. Although slaves could non vote, white Southerners argued that slave labor contributed greatly to the nation's wealth. The Constitution therefore gave representation in the Congress and the balloter college for 3/5ths of every slave (the three/5ths clause). The clause gave the South a office in the national authorities far greater than representation based on its gratis population lonely would have given information technology. The Constitution also provided for a avoiding slave law and made 1807 the primeval year that Congress could act to finish the importation of slaves from Africa.
The Constitution left many questions near slavery unanswered, in particular, the question of slavery'southward status in any new territory acquired by the U.S. The failure to deal forthrightly and comprehensively with slavery in the Constitution guaranteed future disharmonize over the upshot. All realistic hope that slavery might eventually die out in the South concluded when world demand for cotton wool exploded in the early 1800s. Past 1840, cotton fiber produced in the American South earned more money than all other U.S. exports combined. White Southerners came to believe that cotton could be grown on with slave labor. Over time, many took for granted that their prosperity, even their way of life, was inseparable from Africa slavery.
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In the decades preceding 1860, Northerners increasingly supported the right of farmers and workers to bask the fruits of their labor and try to ameliorate themselves. Slavery did not fit with this view. Many Northerners opposed its presence in the territories, which were viewed every bit the birthright of ambitious, complimentary white men. The proposed admission of Missouri as a slave land in 1820 provoked a national fence over slavery. Afterwards much discussion, the 1820 Missouri Compromise was worked out. Under its terms, Maine was admitted equally a free state at the same fourth dimension that Missouri came in as a slave state, maintaining the balance between slave and costless states. Additionally, Congress prohibited slavery in all western territories lying to a higher place latitude 36° 3o' (the southern purlieus of Missouri).
The Missouri Compromise quieted agitation over slavery for only a while. In the 1830s, concerns over the consequence resurfaced for several reasons. One was the appearance in the N of a tiny number of very persistent agitators calling for the immediate abolition of slavery (the abolitionists). Another was the encarmine 1831 Nat Turner slave rebellion in Virginia. White Southerners believed Northern abolitionists encouraged slave revolts, while Southern efforts to silence the abolitionists angry Northern fears about freedom of voice communication.
Later, U.S. victory in the Mexican War of 1846–1848 brought the nation vast new acreage in the West. Once again, the status of slavery in the territories became a hot issue. A new agreement, the Compromise of 1850, was required when the California Territory sought to bring together the Union. Aspects of the compromise included 1) admission of California as a free stat 2) a stronger avoiding slave law; 3) assurance that Congress would not interfere with the interstate traffic in slaves in the South; and 4) prohibition of the slave trade in the Commune o Columbia. The compromise left open the condition of slavery in the other areas won from Mexico. Then, in 1854, the Kansas– Nebraska Deed finer repealed the Missouri Compromise, causing more violent disputes over slavery. Pro– and anti– slavery factions turned the Kansas Territory into a encarmine battleground.
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By and large as a effect of tensions over slavery, a new party, the Republicans, arose in the North in the 1850s. The Republicans made prohibition of slavery in the territories their chief issue. The party was the first in the nation'southward history to draw its support from i section only. Inevitably, the political party angry deep acrimony in the Southward. Attitudes in the two sections of the nation continued to harden in the belatedly 1850s. In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision ruled that Americans of African descent were not U.S. citizens. A failed effort to commencement a slave uprising in Virginia by abolitionist John Brown in 1859 spread fear and distress beyond the South.
The presidential election of 1860 was fought entirely along sectional lines. The Democratic Party finally splintered over slavery, with the political party fielding two candidates. The Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. His platform included government support of route and harbor projects and higher tariffs (import taxes) to protect American industry, in addition to keeping slavery out of the territories. Lincoln won the election past sweeping the Northern states, while declining to gain a unmarried electoral vote in the Deep Due south. Spurred by South Carolina, usa of the Deep South decided that limitation of slavery in the territories was the first step toward a total abolition of slavery.
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Ane by one, seven states — South Caroline, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas – left the Matrimony. Lincoln hoped desperately to maintain the Union without war. When he decided to resupply the U.S. army at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, Confederate forces fired on the fort. Lincoln and then asked for 75,000 volunteers to put downwards the rebellion. This prompted Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas to join the Confederacy. Ceremonious war had come.
There were many sectional differences in 19th–century America. Differences over slavery were the simply ones that could not be settled by peaceful ways. Much show from that time shows that the secession of vii Deep South states was acquired by and large by concerns over the future of slavery. When Mississippi seceded, she published a "Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Include and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union." It stated:
"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery... Utter subjugation awaits the states in the Union, if nosotros should consent longer to remain It is non a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth iv billions of money [the estimated total market value of slaves], or we must secede from the Wedlock framed past our fathers, to secure this also as every other species of belongings."
Slavery, Lincoln, and the Ceremonious State of war
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Source: https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/slavery-cause-civil-war.htm
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