The Civil War, also known as “The War Between the States,” was fought between the United States of America and the Confederate States of America, collection of eleven southern states that left the Union in 1860 and 1861 and formed their own country to protect institution of slavery. The civil war began primarily as a result of the long-standing controversy over enslavement of black people. The war started in April 1861 when secessionist forces attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina just over a month after Abraham Lincoln inaugurated as the President of the United States.
In February 1861, seven Southern slave-holding states declared by their state governments to have seceded from the country. The Confederate States of America organized a rebellion against the U.S. constitutional government. The Confederacy grew to control at least majority of territory in eleven states. It claimed the states of Kentucky and Missouri by declaring from native secessionists fleeing Union authority.
With invention of the cotton gin, cotton became the cash crop of the Deep South, stimulating increased demand for subjugate people from the Upper South to toil the land. As the disparity between plantation owners and poor white people widened in the Deep South, deeply entrenched racism blurred perceived class divides. The slave economy of the South had international economic reach since majority of cotton sold abroad; it connected the United States to the international marketplace.
In the early 19th century, most subjugate men and women worked on large rustic farmstead as house servants or field hands. Life for subjugate men and women was brutal; they were subject to repression, harsh punishments, and strict racial policing. Subjugate people adopted a variety of mechanisms to cope with the depressing realities of life on the farmstead. They withstand slavery through everyday acts, while also occasionally plotting larger-scale revolts. Subjugate men and women produced their own distinctive religious refinement in the US South, combining elements of Christianity and West African traditions and spiritual beliefs.
Abolitionism was a social amend effort to put an end to slavery in the United States. It started in the mid-eighteenth century and lasted until 1865, when slavery was officially outlawed after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The ruse evolved from religious roots to embellish a political attempt that at times erupted into destruction. Though most abolitionists were white, dedicated religious men and women, some of the most powerful and authoritative members of the movement were African women and men who escaped from enslavement.
The Compromise of 1850 acted as a temporary ceasefire on the issue of slavery, addressing the status of not long ago acquired dependency after the Mexican-American War. Under the Compromise, California admitted to the Union as a free state; the slave trade, outlawed in Washington, D.C., a strict new Fugitive Slave Act compelled citizens of free states to accommodate in capturing enslaved people; and the new territories of Utah and New Mexico would authorize white residents to decide whether to allow slavery. Ultimately, the Compromise did not work out the problem of slavery’s augmentation; instead, the incandescent eloquence surrounding the Compromise further polarized the North and the South.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act organized two new territories in the land obtained through the Louisiana Purchase, Kansas and Nebraska. The act established that in these territories, proposition of popular sovereignty would apply, meaning that the white residents of each territory would vote on whether to allow slavery when applying for statehood. The Act revoked the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which drew the horizontal line of slavery across the West along the 36° 30' parallel, as both Kansas and Nebraska were north of this line. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act induced party realignment and violence, furthering the sectional divide that ultimately erupted in the Civil War.
After the Kansas-Nebraska Act restart possibility of slavery extending into new territories, tensions between pro and anti-slavery supporter erupted into chaos. Thoroughgoing abolitionists, like John Brown, attacked and murdered white southerners in protest. A pro-slavery US Senator, Preston Brooks, viciously beat abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate. Bleeding Kansas foreshadowed the violence that would begin over the future of slavery during the Civil War.
