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Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin, a machine that revolutionized the production of cotton by greatly speeding up the process of removing seeds from cotton fiber.
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The cotton boom brought in more settlers to the South, increased slavery in the South, and brought increases to the Textile Industry. Cotton required a lot of manual labor, so many slaves were used for growing cotton. This newfound need for slaves increased the slave trade in the South.
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From the 1830s to the 1860s, the movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength, led by free blacks such as Frederick Douglass and white supporters such as William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the radical newspaper The Liberator, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who published the bestselling antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
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The Underground Railroad had many participants, including John Fairfield in Ohio, the son of a slaveholding family, who made many daring rescues, Levi Coffin, a Quaker who assisted more than 3,000 slaves, and Harriet Tubman, who made 19 trips into the South and escorted over 300 slaves to freedom. It was a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the United States, used by the enslaved to escape into free states and Canada.
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DescriptionThe Liberator was a weekly abolitionist newspaper, published in Boston by William Lloyd Garrison and Isaac Knapp. Religious rather than political, it appealed to the moral conscience of its readers, urging them to demand immediate freeing of the slaves.
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Nat Turner, a well-educated slave and self-proclaimed preacher, led a revolt of around seventy slaves and freed blacks into the town of Southampton, Virginia. The reactions his revolt provoked among northerners and southerners helped lead to the dramatic turning of American’s against one another, something in which the Founding Fathers and people such as Andrew Jackson greatly feared.
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By the mid-19 century the United States was experiencing growth financially, th economic growth seperated. In the North, manufacturing and industry was well established, and agriculture was mostly limited to small-scale farms, while the South’s economy was based on a system of large-scale farming that depended on the labor of black slaves to grow certain crops, especially cotton and tobacco.
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Uncle Tom's Cabin increased opposition to slavery in the North.
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In 1854, the U.S. Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which essentially opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict.
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The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott case confirmed the legality of slavery in the territories.
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The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 caused seven southern states to secede and form the Confederate States of America; four more states soon joined them.
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The Civil War in the United States began in 1861, after decades of tension between northern and southern states over slavery, states’ rights and westward expansion.
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Defenders of slavery argued that slavery had existed throughout history and was the natural state of mankind. The Greeks had slaves, the Romans had slaves, and the English had slavery until very recently.
