"Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pockets, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States."
Frederick Douglass
A project in History B
Fall 1997 by Anders Blixt
Teacher: Yvonne Lennartsson
Komvux in Huddinge, Sweden
Translated into English, summer - fall of 1998
The period around 1850-1860 was filled with debates about the slavery in America. The northern states of America began to grow into an industrialized area while the southern states still were dependent on its plantations of cotton and tobacco. Still, the government that resided during these years tried to keep the nation together with the help of compromises.
Movements started and these began to fight for the freedom of slaves; these were the abolitionists who fought with any means necessary. One of the more famous abolitionists was Harriet Beecher Stowe, married with a clergyman and professor in Cincinnati, Iowa and a mother of four children. To earn some money for her household she began to write novels.
She often saw slaves that fled over the Ohio River. Outraged by a law that demanded that all-runaway slaves were to be returned to their owners, she wrote in 1852 the book "Uncle Tom's Cabin". The book had a remarkable success, under the first year alone it sold over 300,000 copies and the final sale ended somewhere around seven millions! The book created a public resistance against the slavery. When Abraham Lincoln met her in 1861 it is told that he said: "So this is the little woman that wrote the book that started this Great War".
The question about the slavery could maybe be solved in congress as a national question. The democrats that run the nation at this time could have been able to work on time-schedule for the liberation of all slaves. But this became impossible when slavery turned into a moral question.
As soon as it became known that Abraham Lincoln would be the next president, South Carolina broke free from the Union, when 1861 came, six more states, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas, broke free from the Union. In February the Confederacy was formed, later on four more states joined the confederacy, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee.
Of the Unions original 34 states, had now 11 states created the Confederacy of America, these had together a population about 9 millions while the Union had a population about 22 millions, of the confederates 9 million inhabitants approximately 3 to 3,5 million were slaves.