Existing comment:
Causes of the Civil War:
The question of negro slavery has been the apple of discord in the government of the United States since its foundation.... We have dissolved the late Union chiefly because of the negro quarrel.
-- Robert Handy Smith, Alabama congressman, Provisional Confederate Congress, March 1861
Why did Americans, who spoke the same language, begin killing each other? Why did a country that abided by one Constitution descend into chaos and tear itself apart? Why did North and South -- which had struggled together for liberty and independence -- collapse into civil war?
The causes of the Civil War are complex and varied, but one theme recurs in debate after debate -- slavery. Because of slavery, the United States in the mid-1800s faced an unsettled future. Should the Union be a slave-holding republic with pockets of freedom? Or should the nation be a free republic with pockets of slavery? Or even more extreme -- should slavery be abolished?
Regardless of perspective, Americans North and South held beliefs strong enough to plunge the nation into a conflict that claimed nearly 620,000 lives -- the bloodiest war in American history. Why?
Am I not a man and brother?
Property versus humanity was a central question in the struggle over slavery. By legal definition, a slave is property -- a material possession purchased, inherited, owned. This dramatic symbol, vigorously displayed by Northern abolitionists, challenged the assertion of property.
The Terror in Africa:
Africa was the primary source of slaves for European nations colonizing the Western Hemisphere. Africans themselves engaged in the lucrative slave trade, often kidnapping defenseless victims to exchange for cloth, liquor, or guns. The first slaves in British America arrived in Jamestown in 1619 aboard a Dutch vessel. Importing slaves continued for nearly 200 years until outlawed in 1807.
US slave trade, 1830:
Antislavery illustrations like this helped destroy harmony between North and South by highlighting whips and shackled women and children -- the most incendiary symbols of slavery. Southerners railed at these "distortions," claiming that slaves were better fed, housed, clothed, and in better health than impoverished wage earners in the North. |