The Civil War: The War That Divided The United States

by Lance T. Stewart

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end. Shortly before the Emancipation Proclamation was publicly announced, Lincoln wrote to a New York newspaper, outlining his reasoning for freeing slaves in the south in such a way that put a careful distance between the legal measures he was taking and the more extreme stance of the abolitionists: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save

would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to

purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.” The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order issued under Lincoln’s special war time powers which declared the legal freedom of all slaves in the states which had seceded from the Union. The border states which had remained loyal to the Union were not

Amendment to the Constitution was voted into law three years later by Congress. Again, the principle goal of the North in going to war with the South was not to end slavery, but to prevent the southern states from dissolving their ties with the Union. Outlawing slavery was only a means to that end. Lincoln believed that by ending slavery in the South, the Union

of the Abolitionist Movement in the United States The abolitionist movement in the decades leading up to the Civil War created enough open opposition to slavery over the course of the nineteenth century to make the slave owners of the South feel that their way of life was under threat. It was in response to this threat that the southern states seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy. Abolitionists were never a majority in most parts of the country—their

memoirs of slave life from the perspective of free blacks who had escaped from their masters, they disseminated important information about the abuses and evils inherent in slavery that helped to create popular support for the Union cause. Slavery had existed

first New World colony; the first American slave ship began transporting kidnapped African victims of the slave trade to America in 1636. Slavery was abolished in France and England before it was abolished in their colonies, which resulted in the slave trade flourishing in the Americas even though the abolitionist movement was gaining strength in Britain by 1783. Owing to the efforts of William Wilberforce, a British crusader for the abolitionist movement who

Slave Trade, slavery was illegalized throughout the British Empire in 1807. During the Revolutionary War, the British offered freedom to any American slaves who wished to defect

Loyalist side, and a small number of slaves managed to get passage to England on British ships by the war’s end, while others immigrated to Loyalist strongholds in Canada. Others, however, we re-captured by their American masters when America won the war, including at least three women who were slaves of George Washin...

illegal in the state of Rhode Island between 1652 and 1700, due to Puritan religious influences, before it was re-instated by slave interests; during the same period, slavery was illegal in Georgia, before the colonial government capitulating

sentiments, as Alexander Stephens acknowledged in the Cornerstone Speech, but their regard for property rights, and the need to present the delegates from the southern colonies with a document they would be willing to ratify, prevented slavery from being illegalized at the nation’s birth. Between 1777 and 1804, all of the northern states had abolished slavery legally, though the Fugitive Slave clause in the Constitution forced those states to return escaped slaves to their owners in the south. The slave trade—that is, the importing of slaves from Africa or other foreign countries—was made illegal in the Constitution, with a provision that the ban

die out on its own. However, as technological advances like the cotton gin made the south the world’s leading producer of cotton, the rhetoric around slavery changed, and pro-slavery advocates began to claim that slavery was inherent in the divine order, with whites having a Christian duty to wield dominance over the mentally inferior black race. Those who supported slavery, southerners in particular, took deep offense to the abolitionists’ assertion that slavery was a sin according to the theology of the Christian religion. In the nineteenth century, abolitionism had a

United States by the beginning of the Civil War, and southern politicians claimed that abolitionists were attempting to incite the slave population to mass riots, in which their white owners would be slaughtered. Even many of those who opposed slavery believed that abolitionists did more harm than good to the anti-slavery cause, because they inflamed emotional reactions on both sides of the issue. The most famous instance of the dissemination of abolitionist propaganda

in newspapers, beginning in June of 1851. The novel was partially inspired by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Though the

written into the Constitution, required free states to return runaway slaves to their owners, some white communities defied the law, allowing escaped slaves to live in their towns peacefully. The Act of 1850 reaffirmed the Constitutional clause and imposed harsh penalties on government officials who did not cooperate with it. This infuriated abolitionists, who feared that soon every free citizen would be legally compelled to a...

Maryland, but had escaped, and re-settled in Canada, where slavery was illegal under British law. Reactions to Stowe’s novel, which depic...

and emotionally charged. The style of the book is evident in the language Stowe employs in the section quoted below: "Well, here's a pious dog,...

Powerful holy critter, he must be! Here, you rascal,...

out of yer Bible, 'Servants, obey yer masters'? An't I yer master? Didn't I pay down twelve hundred dollars, cash, for all there is inside yer old cussed black shell? An't yer mine, now, bod...

heavy boot; "tell me!" In the very depth of physical suffering, bowed by brutal oppression, this question shot a gleam of...

suddenly stretched himself up, and, looking earnestly to heaven, while the tears and blood that f...

exclaimed, "No! no! no! my soul an't yours, Mas'r! Y...

for, by one that is able to keep it; -- no matter, no...

printed material that criticized slavery). Southern slave

of both slaves and whites, insisted that the novel was inaccurate, even slanderous. A sub-genre of reactionary literature was born as a result, as southern writers penned books such as Aunt

depictions of slave life that featured simple-minded, childlike slaves who were incapable of solving any problems without appealing to their kindly white masters for assistance. Such books claimed ...

and overseas, and it sparked intense dialogue around the slavery issue in the north. (Today, however, owing to the racial caricatures Stowe...

than its literary value.) Another abolitionist writer whose work influenced feeling aga...

Douglass, an orator and politician who had been a s...

teenager. His first biography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, depicted the abuses he had suffered at the hands of over-seers and owners. It a...

education, and his escape to the north. The book was so influential that many pro-slavery advocates, including one of his former masters, insisted that the writing was too eloquent and intelligent to have been produced by a black p...

Douglass’s first encounters with literature after he had finished tea...

began to bear heavily upon my heart. Just about this time, I got hold of a book entitled "The Columbian Orator." Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book. Among much of other

master and his slave. The slave was represented as having run away from his master three times. The dialogue represented the conversation which took place between them, when the slave was retaken the third time. In this dialogue, the

argument in behalf of slavery was brought forward by the master, all of which was disposed of by the slave. The slave was made to say some very smart as well as impressive things in reply to his master-things which had the desired though unexpected effect; for t...

with one of Sheridan's mighty speeches on and in behalf of Catholic

interest. They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance. the moral which I gained from the dialogue was the power of truth over the conscience of ever a slave holder. What I got from Sheridan was a bold denunciation

human rights. The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts, and to meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery; but w...

the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other ligh...

land reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men. As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! That very discontentment which M...

extensive learning, reflected the fact that beliefs in racial equality were not widespread in the nineteenth century,

free and pursue life, liberty, and happiness, they were nonetheless intellectually and morally underdeveloped in comparison to whites. Some doubted whether slaves were even

This was in direct contradiction of the keen interest that many

presided over by black preachers, but after Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, these gatherings were largely curtailed, because

opportunity to organize further uprisings. Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad "I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty,

fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted, and when the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me." Harriet Tubman,

biography by Sarah Bradford, 1868 The most famous abolitionist of the Civil War era is undoubtedly Harriet Tubman, a former slave who

she may have been around thirty. Tubman was...