![]() ![]() All realistic hope that slavery might eventually die out in the South ended when world demand for cotton exploded in the early 1800s. The failure to deal forthrightly and comprehensively with slavery in the Constitution guaranteed future conflict over the issue. ![]() The Constitution left many questions about slavery unanswered, in particular, the question of slavery’s status in any new territory acquired by the U.S. The Constitution also provided for a fugitive slave law and made 1807 the earliest year that Congress could act to end the importation of slaves from Africa. ![]() The clause gave the South a role in the national government far greater than representation based on its free population alone would have given it. The Constitution therefore gave representation in the Congress and the electoral college for 3/5ths of every slave (the 3/5ths clause). Although slaves could not vote, white Southerners argued that slave labor contributed greatly to the nation’s wealth. Constitution was written in 1787, however, the interests of slaveholders and those who profited from slavery could not be ignored. Picking Cotton on a Georgia Plantation, 1858 The future of slavery in the South was debated, and some held out the hope that it would eventually disappear there as well. Reacting to that contradiction, the Northern states decided to phase out slavery following the Revolution. African slavery was central to the development of British North America.Īlthough slavery existed in all 13 colonies at the start of the American Revolution in 1775, a number of Americans (especially those of African descent) sensed the contradiction between the Declaration of Independence’s ringing claim of human equality and the existence of slavery. Many Northern merchants made their fortunes either in the slave trade or by exporting the products of slave labor. Southern plantations using slave labor produced the great export crops - tobacco, rice, forest products, and indigo - that made the American colonies profitable. By the early 1700s in British North America, slavery meant African slavery. Unable to find cheap labor from other sources, white settlers increasingly turned to slaves imported from Africa. European settlers brought a system of slavery with them to the western hemisphere in the 1500s. The roots of the crisis over slavery that gripped the nation in 1860–1861 go back to the nation’s founding. in the war, emancipation was the primary aim. For the 200,000 African Americans who ultimately served the U.S. Soldiers fight for many reasons - notably to stay alive and support their comrades in arms - and the North’s goal in the beginning was preservation of the Union, not emancipation. That is not to say that the average Confederate soldier fought to preserve slavery or that the North went to war to end slavery. Today, most professional historians agree with Stephens that slavery and the status of African Americans were at the heart of the crisis that plunged the U.S. New York Public Library Digital Collections Sergeant Furney Bryant, 1st North Carolina Colored Troops Stephens, March 21, 1861, reported in the Savannah Republican, emphasis in the original Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea its foundations are laid, its corner–stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man that slavery - subordination to the superior race - is his natural and normal condition. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old 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. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution - African slavery as it exists amongst us - the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. In March 1861, Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States of America, gave his view: One important way of approaching the issue is to look at what contemporary observers had to say. The role of slavery in bringing on the Civil War has been hotly debated for decades. Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States of America
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