A lot of people think that the Civil War was the first argument over fought over slavery. Hate to break it to you, but it wasn't. There were tons of arguments of slavery before that; in fact, the people who wrote the Constitution argued over whether slavery should be legal (and even before the Constitution, Jefferson apparently wanted to add a clause about slaves, even though he himself had slaves. The clause was edited it out to appease the Southerners). Some believed strongly that slavery was wrong, but others couldn't imagine life with out them. The Founding Fathers made the decision to leave it up to the states to decide whether or not slavery would be legal in their respective states.
Then they argued about how to count slaves when they were deciding the number of Representatives each state would have, because the more populous the state, the more Representatives. It was important. Maybe not the best method, but important. Debates continued every time a new state was added and that state had to decide if slavery was legal. The Southern states, actually, refused to sign the Constitution because they wanted each slave to count as a person; not because they were suddenly all non-slavery for a moment, but for voting and taxes and such. They had to compromise between the Northern and Southern states. The Northern states were worried that if slaves were counted as people, the South would have more Representatives than the North. So instead of counting each slave as a person, like they should've, because this whole nonsense is awful, they counted each slave as three-fifths of a person so that the South wouldn't have too big of an advantage.
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| James Madison cut into 3/5 |
Just think about that for a moment. Laboring under the hot, sweltering sun, pulling cotton off of sharp plants, pricking your fingers, blood running down your calloused hands, getting whipped if you do anything wrong, the rope biting into your flesh, burning a trail of hot pain, more blood pouring down your back and arms, leaving scars. And still, after all that and more, you don't get counted as a person. After all that and more, you're still looked down upon, you're still looked at as property, though you have feelings just like anyone else. It's terrible.
Back on topic, The Missouri Compromise. That was another argument over slavery before the Civil War. It turned out that letting the state decide whether slavery was allowed or not ended up causing problems.The Missouri Compromise was made to stabilize the number of free states and slave states. The Territory of Missouri asked to join the Union in 1818. Slavery was legal at the time in Missouri, and about ten thousand slaves lived in the state. Most people expected it to be a slave state. When Missouri's proposal to be admitted into the Union was given to Congress, there were eleven free states and eleven slave states. Missouri's proposal would completely destroy the balance if accepted, though it had been threatened before, though it was temporary. So Congress refused to allow Missouri in until a non-slave state applied for the Union. Luckily, Maine did that same year, so Congress agreed to let Missouri in as a slave state and Maine in as a free state, so the balance would still be there.
A lot of people think that the Civil War was fought over slavery, but that's not true. I know it's easy to believe, especially because when you learn about the Civil War, a lot of teachers go in depth about slavery as well, so it's a reasonable conclusion. I believed it, too. Yeah, slavery was a major part of the Civil War, but the main part was fought over secession, which is when one state breaks away from all the states as a whole. Essentially, America was literally split up. Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Caroline, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, and Arkansas were all southern states. The south was warmer and had really good soil used for farming. That's why slaves were useful in the south—they didn't have to pay for the slaves to do the work for them, and they didn't really care if it was too hot to work outside. The slaves worked and took care of in the fields and farms all day, planting tobacco, cotton, and other crops. Since there were very little farms up north, there really wasn't any need for slaves...so not a lot of people had them.
Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, Kentucky, California, Oregon, and Kansas were the northern states. The reasons that they fought in the civil war were this: slavery, of course. Some people in the north, or the Union, disliked slavery, called abolitionists. They wanted to eliminate slavery from the whole country, and would willingly fight a war for that. But the people who didn't really care about slavery wanted the country to remain together, and so they fought in the war. They wouldn't fight a war for only slavery, but the people who didn't care at all about slaves, called non-abolitionists, were okay with fighting a war, willing even, if it meant one whole country, a united one.
There was another cause of the war: The Compromise of 1850. The Compromise banned the slave trade but let slavery continue. This made Kansas, Oregon, and California free states, but still allowed the other states to choose whether they'd be a free or slave state. The Compromise also made people in the north to return runaway slaves to their owner. That was a major problem in the north, because the people in north wanted to allow slaves to be free once they reached northern land. It was a major issue in the south because they wanted free states to be slave states. Since both sides weren't happy about the Compromise, they took it out on each other, another problem that caused the Civil War.
We all know what slavery is. Slaves are people who work and toil, not getting paid, providing all the bare necessities, and nothing more; basically, a person owning another human being. The owner is usually called master or mistress. Slavery started a long time before the Civil War, long before even the European Explorers came to the New World, and, believe it or not, it still exists today, here, now. Slavery most likely started, though we're not sure, with the surge of farming, around ten thousand years ago. It happened in the ancient times, during the Greek and Roman Empires, when the Jews were the slaves. Slavery went down after the Roman Empire fell, during the Middle Ages. The Roman Empire falling caused a decrease in trading between all nations, causing less good to be sold, and, as a result, a lowering need of slaves. Then slavery came back when the European explorers came to the new world, at around the fifteen or sixteens hundreds, because they used slaves to dig up gold and other precious metals. In the eighteen hundreds, slavery again started to decrease as people began to wonder if slavery was truly right.
Slavery of African Americans appeared in the United States in the 1600s with the American Colonies. Then slavery spread and grew in the southern part of the United States in the early to mid-1800s. The south is where big plantations, farms, and fields needed a lot of workers to grow tobacco, cotton, and other crops. At the same time, slavery simply wasn't needed in the northern small farms and such. In the U.S., most slaves were black, and the owners white. As a result, this caused white people to look down on all black people, regardless of if they were slaves or not. It was different in other countries, because the United States had an easy time of recognizing a slave: the color of their skin. Awful, yes, but the way it was. That made it ten times as hard for a slave to escape, because they could be recognized easily and caught. After the Civil War, in 1865, America abolished, or got rid of, slavery completely. Slavery is illegal in many parts of the world today, but it still happens in some parts of Asia, Africa, and South America. Though it is illegal, slavery has left its mark on black and white Americans....unfortunately. 
Slavery began at around 3500 B.C., and it was in all kinds of places: Egypt, Assyria, China, India, Iraq, and a lot of other Middle Eastern countries. Other places also had slavery, such as the Early Blacks of Africa, or the Indians of America. Some people think that slaves were all black, when in reality, that's not true. In fact, the main slaves were captured in war or were people who broke the law, or even people who just couldn't pay their bills, because apparently, jail just wasn't enough. Not only that, but when products became in higher demands, so did slaves. Farming gave people a chance to put prisoners of war to work for their gain. Slavery is basically like a virus: once released, it spreads until it can only be contained, not destroyed completely.
The Mediterranean countries used slaves to work on sugar farms. At around 1300, African Blacks started to replace Russian slaves in Europe. Spanish Conquerors had slaves that they taken once they had discovered the New World. These were Native Americans that they used to help search for gold. The Native Americans also helped kill the other Native American tribes so the Spanish could have their land. If they hadn't helped, they would've been killed. Once the native population began to decline drastically due to disease, demand rose for more slaves. It's true that most slaves were from Africa, like lots of people believe, but there were also Native Americans and Asians. African slaves were brought on U.S. ships to work, and once they were slaves in the U.S., their children were also forced to be slaves. It's also not true that every black person came to America on a slave ship. Some were free. They were just looking for a better life, and they came to America. There were also other former slaves that were free by: escaping, earning enough money to buy themselves out of slavery, or being set free by a nice master, usually when the master was dying. 
Now for the fifth myth:
No, not all people in the North were against slavery. While some people didn't care if it continued or if it stopped, some people in the North actually wanted it to continue. Yes, a lot of people in the North were abolitionists, but some people did want slavery. They just weren't dumb enough to say it in front of a group of abolitionists. Most abolitionists didn't believe in hurting others, so they were mostly calm. But some, like John Brown, believe in force, physical force, instead of compromising and words. Abolitionists started an action against slavery in the 1800s. They wanted to end slavery. But the people who owned slaves weren't going to sit back and let that happen.
They stuck up for it in something called the pro-slavery movement. Some of the Southerners and Northerners that took part in it fought that slavery was "like a law of nature" that let the strong rule the weak. Other people thought that the Bible approved of slavery. You have to notice though, that the North didn't make their living by faming, so they didn't need slaves. Some Northeners thought that we needed slaves to get cotton, tobacco, and other crops, and others made their living off of transporting African slaves to the U.S. and transporting cotton and tobacco to Europe. They thought they'd lose their jobs if there were no more slaves. Some people even thought that being a slave was better than living in Africa. Almost all Southeners and Northeners thought slavery should continue by the 1860s. And here you were thinking that the North didn't approve of slavery.
Not all people wanted slavery in the South, though most people did. The people who didn't want slavery that lived in the South and spoke their mind were called, just like in the North, abolitionists. Most were from the North, but some did live in the South. John Brown, the abolitionist mentioned earlier, didn't believe in slavery, but he still lived in the South. Some people in the South didn't own plantations or slaves, so they didn't care one way or another, because if slavery was banned, they wouldn't lost anything at all. On the other hand, most people in the South did want slavery, because they had the right soil and climate for farming and things that grew on plantations. Their plantations were enormous, and why pay someone to work the field when you can spend some money and not have to pay anyone ever again to work the fields? But not all people that owned slaves were cruel. Some treated their slaves well. They gave them gifts or even money if they did a good job. But other people didn't treat their slaves well at all, punishing them and threatening them if they didn't do the job correctly. Slaves, though, were most likely over-worked and punished, and they worked on farms and mines alike. Some were treated as if they were a family member of the owner. Those slaves were mostly servants. There were cases where slaves became free because the owner died and stated in his will that because the slaves worked so hard and loyally, they were to be freed.
A lot of people think that the Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves, but in reality, it didn't. The Proclamation didn't exactly free all the slaves because it only talked about areas that were already in control of the Confederacy. When the South broke away from the North, Abraham Lincoln couldn't force the people in the South obey the Emancipation Proclamation. But after the North won the war, the South had to listen to Abraham Lincoln. Even though no slaves were actually freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, it did eventually lead to the 13th Amendment, which banned people from owning another person. The 13th Amendment became a law on December 18th, 1865, and ended slavery in the United States.
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Some people think that after the Civil War, all blacks had the right to vote. But Blacks didn't have the right to vote at the end of the war. The South put together governments that didn't allow Blacks to vote. People from the southern states, lead on by the some of the same leaders of the Union states, created Black Codes that stopped blacks from getting all of their actual rights. Remember, the Civil War wasn't about stopping racism, it was about stopping slavery. Some of these activities were possiblw because Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, and Andrew Johnson took his place. A month after he was president, Andrew Johnson caused the states to allow white people to be in conventions that rewrote the southern constitutions. But in 1866, furious members of Congress passed a bill saying a U.S. citizen is anyone who was born in the United States, except for Native Americans. Andrew Johnson tried to stop the passing of the bill, but Congress passed it anyway. The bill also said that all citizens had the same rights, no matter the race, and said that the government (federal) was allowed to get involved if the states didn't protect those rights. And a month later, the legislature passed the 14th Amendment, saying that states couldn't deny any citizens the equal protection of the law. Southern legislators refused to accept or confirm the law, but Congress said it was in motion.
In 1867 and 1868, a third of all delagates in the constitutional convention were blacks, and almost all of the delegates in the South Carolina convention were blacks. The southern state constitution at the time were fair to blacks, and gave them voting rights, but unfortunately, that didn't last long. The Ku Klux Klan formed in the south and threatened blacks and took away their power. They beat, killed, and stoned many African Americans, along with burning their houses. And after the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, whites took over again as the federal troops were pulled out of the South. From the 1870s through most of the 1900s, blacks were forced to take reading and writing tests (and remember, most couldn't read or write at the time) and were threatened with violence if they voted. There were other voting rules that tried to ban blacks from voting as well. In fact, it wasn't until 1965, nearly a hundred years after the Civil War, that the Voting Rights Act was signed by President Lyndon Johnson that made it illegal to ban blacks from voting.
After the Civil War, Blacks and Whites were not treated equally. The war was for slavery, not for racism! After the Civil War, blacks had less rights than whites. During this time, called the "Age of Jim Crow," the first generation of blacks that were born into freedom were confused about their place in society, and they lived in the most violent period in the history of the United States, which would last for more than half a century. When the 15th Amendment to the United States gave black people the right to vote, the southern people weren't okay with that. To them, it gave the idea that black people were equal to white people, and that didn't go over well with them. They kept black people from voting in many ways, such as violence: attacks and intimidation were common methods to dissuade blacks from voting. A lot of things were held against blacks as a reason not to vote. Landlords would threaten that the black voters would lose their homes, and bosses threaten that black voters would lost their jobs if they didn't vote for white parties.
On transportation, too, the races were treated differently. Buses, trains, and street cars forced blacks to sit separately from whites for almost a hundred years after the Civil War. On trains, they had separate train cars, where the blacks had cars that weren't as nice as the whites' cars. On buses and street cars, blacks had to sit in the back and get up from their seats if a white person wanted it. There was such thing as middle class blacks, like lawyers and professors and others who were allowed to ride on white cars, but they were usually threatened so they wouldn't want to. Most whites thought that they were too good for blacks to ride with them. Even at nearly one hundred years after the Civil War, there was still segregation on transportation. Most people know about the buses and such because of people like Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat, and Sojourner Truth, who refused to sit in the back of a street car in Washington D.C.
As if that wasn't enough, there was also the KKK, or the Ku Klux Klan, in the picture. They were another group of people that thought whites were better than blacks. They treated blacks awfully. They literally had so much time that they went all around and attacked blacks and whites they thought were helping blacks. There were a lot of forms of attack...they would burn crosses on lawns, burn houses, destroy houses, drag blacks out of their houses, humiliate them, sometimes torturing them, even hanging some of them. The first try to stop segregation was the Plessy v. Ferguson case. It said that blacks and whites could be separate, but they would be equal. Later, though, people realized that separate people weren't equal. Schools were different as well. There's a good example in Topeka, Kansas, in the 1950s, when a little African American girl named Linda Brown, couldn't go to the white school closest to her, so she had to walk many blocks, through a railway stitch yard, and then board a bus to get to her school out of the four black schools in her area. The white school were new and updated, and the state spend one hundred forty two dollars on whites students, and seventy two dollars were spent on black people. Linda Brown's father fought for black people to go to the same school as whites and he won.
So I went to a field trip at the Atlanta History Center that sort of taught us about this. I say sort of because once you've been there eight times, there's not much they can teach you that they haven't already. I knew African Americans were treated like property, and that's horrible, but once you hear it over and over on the same field trip...yeah. But they did actually teach me something. They taught me that most of the soldiers' lives in the Civil War depended on luck. So you could be the greatest fighter in the whole war, and if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, you were put out of business. Permanently. Not to mention that if you got shot in the arm or leg, they amputated it off you. They went through the whole procedure of amputation, and it was horrifying. You inject the soldier with something that gets them not to feel anything. Then you take a knife, peel back the skin of the arm, and push it to the soldier. Then you use the knife to saw through the arm, till you hit the bone. That's when you bring out a bigger knife, and saw right throught the bone. Then, with the stump of your arm, the trim the remaining bone that's sticking out, pull back the skin they peeled, and sewed it back together. But they demonstrated it...not in real life, but they mimed it, and it was disgusting. Especially when our guide told us that they didn't clean the knives all the way, so they kept using the same dirty knives for every amputation, causing disease to spread and kill more people than the actually fighting did.
And that's all for now, people.
