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Causes of the Civil War_ The Road to Disunion.mp418 The Election of 1860 & the Road to Disunion_ Crash Course US History #18.mp4Civil War Causes.mp4The time period in United States history between 1820 and 1861 is often called the antebellum period. During the antebellum period, the North and South became more divided.
Which war ended the antebellum period?
The American Civil War began in 1861. So, the antebellum period is named for the period before the Civil War (1820–1861).
The Civil War was the bloodiest war in American history, and historians often study the antebellum period to understand what led to the war.
The American Civil War was fought between 1861 and 1865. Look at the following timeline of some of the major events that happened in the United States before the Civil War.
What was it like growing up during the antebellum period?
Most American children had to work. Since most Americans lived in rural areas, many children helped with farming:
On farms without enslaved people, the labor was often split up by gender. So, boys helped tend the fields, while girls helped cook and maintain the house.
On plantations, both enslaved boys and girls worked in the fields.
Only some American children went to school:
In the North, most children received some schooling.
In the South, school was less common for white children. It was illegal in most Southern states to educate enslaved African American children.
The issue of slavery was the main cause of the Civil War. During the antebellum period, free states banned slavery and slave states allowed slavery. The maps below show the population of enslaved people at two different points in U.S. history. The first map shows the United States in 1800. The second map shows the United States in 1860, the year before the Civil War began.
How did slavery disappear in the North?
Starting in the era of the American Revolution, white and African American activists pushed to end slavery in the states.
In some states, lawmakers responded to activists' demands by passing gradual emancipation laws. These laws ended slavery over time, most often by freeing children of enslaved people once they reached a certain age.
In other states anti-slavery activists argued that slavery went against state constitutions. In the early 1780s, Elizabeth Freeman, an enslaved woman in Massachusetts used this strategy and won her freedom in a court case. Freeman's case helped end slavery in Massachusetts.
By the mid-1800s, all Northern states had ended slavery.
In the decades before the Civil War, a group of people known as abolitionists opposed slavery. Some abolitionists used pictures to show their opinions about slavery. The picture below shows a slave auction in South Carolina. At an auction, slave traders sold enslaved people to the highest bidder, or the person who offered the most money.
What kinds of people became abolitionists?
Abolitionists came from many different backgrounds. Here are some of the biggest groups:
Many abolitionists were African American people. Some of them had been formerly enslaved, while others had been born free.
Many people were abolitionists for religious reasons. They believed that if all humans were God's children, then slavery was wrong. But religious people disagreed about slavery. Some people used their religious beliefs to argue for slavery.
Many women joined the abolitionist movement. Female abolitionists believed that women and enslaved people should have the same rights as other Americans.
Imagine you are a historian trying to understand the debates over slavery in the decades before the Civil War.
What have historians discovered from examining sources about slavery?
Many things! For example, historians can use sources to determine the types of arguments that pro-slavery Americans used to defend slavery:
Economic arguments: Enslaved people grew crops like cotton that were important to the American economy. Pro-slavery Americans argued that the United States would be poorer without slavery.
Racial arguments: Pro-slavery Americans argued that African American people did not deserve the freedoms of white people. They argued slavery was needed to make sure that African American people did not try to become equal.
Legal arguments: Pro-slavery Americans argued that the United States Constitution protected the right to own property. They believed that enslaved people were property, so the federal government had to support the property rights of slaveholders.
Religious arguments: Pro-slavery Americans argued that the Bible supported slavery based on race. But abolitionists also often made religious arguments against slavery, arguing that the Bible supported treating other people well.
By the 1820s, the North had a higher population than the South, and the North's population was increasing faster. As tensions grew over slavery, many Southerners worried that their section,or region, might lose power in the federal government. The table below shows how members of the federal government are chosen.
Was there a balance between the North and South in the House of Representatives?
In the House of Representatives, states receive a number of congresspeople based on their population. By the 1820s, the North had a higher population than the South. So, states in the North had more representatives than states in the South.
Southern politicians, such as John C. Calhoun, worried the North's rising population would mean less political power for the South. Calhoun hoped Southerners could keep power in the Senate.
In 1820, Northern and Southern politicians argued about whether Missouri should enter the Union, or the United States, as a slave state. Northern and Southern politicians made a deal called the Missouri Compromise.
In 1845, the United States annexed, or took control of, the independent country of Texas. The annexation of Texas led to the U.S.-Mexican War. Below is a quotation from an 1847 speech by Northern congressman David Wilmot about the war.
We are fighting this war for Texas and the South. . . . Northern treasure is being exhausted, and Northern blood poured on the plains of Mexico. . . . Slavery follows in the rear of our armies. Shall this government . . . plant slavery in these territories?
treasure: money
exhausted: spent
follows in the rear of: follows behind
The U.S.-Mexican War: victory or poison?
The U.S.-Mexican War ended in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The United States gained a large amount of land in that treaty, including parts of present-day Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. Many Americans worried that the new land would cause more problems than benefits. The author Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that the war was a "poison," because it would lead to fights over whether slavery should be spread to those territories.
After the U.S.-Mexican War, Americans were divided about whether slavery should be allowed in the new territories gained by the war. In 1850, Congress passed a group of laws called the Compromise of 1850. Below are some of the laws passed as part of the compromise.
Why was California so important to Northerners and Southerners?
In 1848, gold was discovered in California. In the California Gold Rush, tens of thousands of Northerners and Southerners moved to California. Some Southerners even brought their enslaved people to hunt for gold. Americans believed that because of its size, location on the Pacific Ocean, and resources, California would be an important free or slave state.
Even after the Compromise of 1850, pro-slavery Californians hoped that their state would change the law and allow slavery. Tension between anti-slavery and pro-slavery Californians was high. In 1859, an anti-slavery Californian senator was shot by a pro-slavery politician in a duel.
The Fugitive Slave Act was one of the laws passed in the Compromise of 1850. The Fugitive Slave Act required that Northerners help capture and return escaped enslaved people.
Were escaped enslaved people safe anywhere in the United States?
No! With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, enslaved people realized that they would need to go to Canada or another country to be safe. Canada was part of the British Empire, so United States laws did not apply there.
From the South, the trip to Canada was much longer than the trip to the Northern states. Despite the distance, thousands of escaped enslaved people made it to Canada.
The Fugitive Slave Act further divided Northerners and Southerners. This division between North and South was often called sectionalism. Below are some of the opinions that Americans had about the Fugitive Slave Act.
The Compromise of 1850 did not stop debates over slavery, especially in regard to western territories and new states. In 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. According to the act, the people in the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska would vote on whether to allow slavery in their territories. This law undid part of the Missouri Compromise, which had previously drawn a line to divide territories between slave and free. The following map shows the United States in 1854. The Kansas-Nebraska Act angered many anti-slavery Northerners.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act said that people living in Kansas and Nebraska would vote on whether to allow slavery within their borders. In the months after the act became law, the territory of Kansas became known as Bleeding Kansas.
Why did people care so much about whether Kansas had slavery?
In 1854, there were few people in Kansas. Still, both anti-slavery and pro-slavery Americans saw Kansas as a test for what would happen to other western territories. Both sides believed that if they won in Kansas, they had a better chance of winning in other western territories.
Both anti-slavery and pro-slavery Americans sent rifles to settlers in Kansas to help their side win the fighting in the territory. Some of these rifles were known as "Beecher's bibles." They were named after an abolitionist minister who believed in arming anti-slavery settlers.
The violence in Kansas horrified many Americans. In Congress, Northern and Southern lawmakers blamed each other for what was happening in the territory. In 1856, the Northern senator Charles Sumner gave a speech about Kansas in which he insulted a Southern senator. A few days later, a cousin of the insulted senator, Congressman Preston Brooks, attacked Sumner with a heavy cane on the floor of the Senate.
Controversies like Bleeding Kansas pushed more Northerners to oppose slavery. However, anti-slavery Americans were often divided about the best political strategy to deal with slavery. In other words, people disagreed about how to address the problem.
Did abolitionists agree on a strategy to end slavery?
No. Abolitionists argued with each other almost as much as they argued with slaveholders. Abolitionists tried many different strategies to end slavery during the antebellum period.
Sometimes, individual abolitionists changed their minds about which strategies would work best. For example, after escaping slavery, Frederick Douglass joined a group of abolitionists who opposed working with political parties. For much of the 1840s, Douglass argued that the American political system was corrupt and should be avoided.
However, by the end of the 1850s, Douglass had changed his mind. He came to believe that anti-slavery politicians had the best chance to force an end to slavery.
In the mid-1850s, many anti-slavery Americans joined together to form a new political party called the Republican Party. People had many different reasons for joining the Republican Party. Some Republicans believed that it was wrong to enslave African American people. Other Republicans disliked slavery because they thought it gave too much power to wealthy slaveholders. Despite their differences, Republicans agreed that the spread of slavery had to end.
What kinds of people joined the Republican Party?
Along with anti-slavery activists, many types of Americans joined the Republicans:
Manufacturers: Republicans tended to support laws that helped American manufacturers. For example, they favored creating tariffs, or taxes that made it more expensive to buy foreign-made goods.
Small farmers: Most American farmers only had their families to help them farm. These farmers did not want to compete against slaveholders who owned dozens or hundreds of people.
German-Americans: In the 1840s and 1850s, thousands of Germans moved to the United States to find freedom. Many were horrified that slavery existed in their new country.
Carl Schurz was a German-American leader who joined the Republican Party. Before coming to the United States, Schurz had fought in a failed revolution in Germany. During the 1850s, former revolutionaries from Germany like Schurz opposed slavery and joined the Republicans.
Debates over slavery reshaped American politics in the 1850s. By 1856, the Whig Party had been replaced by the anti-slavery Republican Party. The map below shows the presidential election of 1856.
Who did the Republicans replace?
The Whigs were a political party that came together during the 1830s and fell apart in the 1850s. Originally, they formed to oppose Andrew Jackson and his Democratic Party. Whigs tended to support a stronger federal government than the Democrats did.
Why did the Whigs disappear?
During the 1850s, slavery became a more central issue in American politics. The Whigs were divided about what to do about slavery. Many Northern Whigs were anti-slavery, while Southern Whigs tended to be pro-slavery. Because the Whigs were divided, the party broke apart by the 1856 election.
Many former Northern Whigs, such as Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, joined the anti-slavery Republican Party.
During the late 1850s, Americans were divided over the issue of slavery. On occasion, the Supreme Court ruled on important cases that involved slavery. These court decisions shaped many Americans' opinions about slavery. In 1857, the Supreme Court made an important decision about slavery in the case Dred Scott v. Sandford. Dred Scott was an enslaved person who argued that he should be free. The following map shows two places where Dred Scott's master took him to live in the 1830s.
Did Americans pay much attention to Dred Scott's case?
Yes. Supreme Court decisions apply to the entire country. A decision about Dred Scott's freedom could affect laws about slavery throughout the country. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney thought the case was a chance to settle the issue of slavery in the western territories once and for all.
Dred Scott believed he had the right to freedom. The following passage comes from the Supreme Court's decision about Dred Scott's rights.
Chief Justice Roger Taney
[African American people] are . . . not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for . . . citizens of the United States.
instrument: legal document
The majority of the Supreme Court justices believed that Dred Scott was not a citizen. The court ruled against Dred Scott's case for freedom.
How did the court ruling affect the lives of African American people?
The Supreme Court ruled that African American people could not not be citizens, even if they were not enslaved. Because of the court ruling, the African American leader Frederick Douglass was denied a passport to travel to other countries. The federal government argued that only U.S. citizens could get a passport, and that because Douglass was African American, he could not be a citizen.
Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists argued that the Supreme Court had made a terrible ruling in the Dred Scott case.
In the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court also ruled that the federal government could not pass laws that banned slavery in any of the western territories.
Why did the Supreme Court consider the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional?
The Missouri Compromise banned slavery in territories north of the latitude line 36°30'. According to the Supreme Court, banning slavery took away slaveholders' constitutional right to own property. In this case, the property was enslaved people.
Did the entire Supreme Court agree with the court decision?
No. Two of the nine court justices dissented, or disagreed, with the decision. Along with other reasons, they both believed that there was no good legal argument to throw out the Missouri Compromise.
The Supreme Court's decision in the Dred Scott case outraged many Americans, especially in the North. They thought that slaveholders were gaining too much power. In 1858, an Illinois Republican named Abraham Lincoln gave a speech about the role of slavery in the United States.
As the nation became more divided over slavery, violence between pro-slavery and anti-slavery Americans increased. Abolitionists, or people who wanted slavery to end, often disagreed about strategy. In 1859, one abolitionist attempted to start a rebellion of enslaved people in the town of Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
What was John Brown's plan?
The army kept many weapons at Harpers Ferry. Brown hoped to give the weapons to enslaved people. He wanted the enslaved people to fight slaveholders. Brown hoped the rebellion would spread to other areas with enslaved people.
Did John Brown's plan work?
No. Most enslaved people in the area didn't know about the raid. Soldiers surrounded Brown's group. Brown was captured, and some of his men, including his sons, were killed.
John Brown's attempted rebellion of enslaved people failed, and he was captured by authorities. While in prison in December 1859, he handed a note to his guard. Read the following text from that note.
I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged . . . [except] with blood.
purged: removed
Brown believed that violence would be necessary to end slavery.
After John Brown's attempted rebellion of enslaved people, even Americans who were opposed to slavery were divided about his actions.
John Brown: terrorist or freedom fighter?
In 1859, Americans were divided about John Brown. Here are some of the opinions people had about Brown:
Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman knew Brown and thought he was a good man. They believed it was right to fight slavery in any way possible. Tubman had even planned to join Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, but missed it due to illness.
Most white Southerners thought Brown was a dangerous criminal. They believed that Brown and other abolitionists were trying to destroy the Southern way of life.
Abraham Lincoln thought it was wrong to break the law, even if a person disagreed with it. He thought Brown gave anti-slavery people a bad name.
As the struggles over slavery increased, Americans used a variety of methods to express their political opinions.
Could everyone vote in antebellum elections?
No. Women and most African American men could not vote. Before the Civil War, only a few Northern states allowed African American men to vote. Enslaved African American people in the South also could not vote.
Later, two amendments to the Constitution granted those groups' voting rights:
In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment granted African American men's right to vote. But this law was not enforced in many states until the 1960s.
In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment granted women's right to vote.
By the end of the 1850s, the anti-slavery Republican Party was strong enough that it stood a good chance of winning a national election. In 1860, the Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln for president.
Honest Abe versus the Little Giant
Abraham Lincoln became famous for a series of debates he had with Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois. Douglas was nicknamed "the Little Giant" because he was both short and politically powerful. He was seen as someone likely to become president. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the two men took different positions about the federal government and slavery:
Douglas thought that the federal government should let people in the territories decide if they wanted slavery.
Lincoln believed that the federal government should stop slavery from spreading.
Who won the debates?
It's hard to say. The debates were held during a senate election, and Douglas won the election. However, the debates helped make Lincoln famous. Many Republicans started to think that Lincoln would be a good choice for president.
While the Republican Party was united behind Abraham Lincoln as their candidate for president in 1860, the Democratic Party could not decide on one single candidate. Look at the following map of the presidential election results in 1860.
Soon after Lincoln's election, several Southern states decided to secede. The word "secede" comes from the Latin se, meaning "apart," and cedere, meaning "to go."
Many of the seceding states wrote declarations of secession to explain why they were leaving the Union. The following passages come from the declarations of secession of Georgia and Mississippi.
Georgia Declaration of Secession, January 1861
The party of Lincoln, called the Republican Party . . . [admits] to be an anti-slavery party. The prohibition of slavery in the Territories, hostility to [slavery] everywhere, [and] the equality of the black and white races is the cardinal principle of this organization.
prohibition: banning
cardinal principle: main idea
Mississippi Declaration of Secession, January 1861
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest [economic] interest of the world. . . . [A] blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution [of slavery]. There was no choice left [to] us but . . . abolition, or a dissolution of the Union . . .
commerce: business
abolition: the end of slavery
dissolution: breaking apart
Did most white Southerners support the Confederacy?
The South was a diverse place, but most white Southerners ended up supporting the Confederacy. Support for the Confederacy was especially strong in areas with a lot of powerful slaveholders.
Some white Southerners did oppose the Confederacy. Many of those Southerners lived in areas without many powerful slaveholders, such as the western part of Virginia. When Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861, the more anti-Confederacy western part of Virginia seceded from the state! The new state of West Virginia entered the Union in 1863.
By the time Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as U.S. president, seven Southern states had seceded from the Union. These states attempted to form a new country called the Confederate States of America, or the Confederacy. In March of 1861, the vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, gave a speech about why the South had seceded. Read the passage.
Our new government is founded upon . . . the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery . . . is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first . . . based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
negro: an old term for people of African heritage
condition: status of place in society
Many events connected to slavery led to the Civil War.
Did Americans know that secession would lead to the Civil War?
Many Northerners and Southerners knew that secession would probably lead to a war. Still, Americans weren't sure what would happen during that war. They didn't know how long it would last. They didn't know who would win and lose. They also didn't know whether it would settle the issue of slavery once and for all.
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