Slavery

Slavery was an increasingly Southern institution. Abolition of slavery in the North, begun in the revolutionary era and largely complete by the 1830s, divided the United States into the slave South and the free North. As this happened, slavery came to define the essence of the South: to defend slavery was to be pro-Southern, whereas opposition to slavery was considered anti-Southern. Although most Southern whites did not own slaves (the proportion of white families that owned slaves declined from 35 percent to 26 percent between 1830 and 1860), slavery more and more set the South off from the rest of the country and the Western world. If at one time slavery had been common in much of the Americas, by the middle of the 19th century it remained only in Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the southern United States. In an era that celebrated liberty and equality, the slaveholding Southern states appeared backward and repressive.

In fact, the slave economy grew rapidly, enriched by the spectacular increase in cotton cultivation to meet the growing demand of Northern and European textile manufacturers. Southern economic growth, however, was based largely on cultivating more land. The South did not undergo the industrial revolution that was beginning to transform the North; the South remained almost entirely rural. In 1860 there were only five Southern cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants (only one of which, New Orleans, was in the Deep South); less than 10 percent of Southerners lived in towns of at least 2500 people, compared to more than 25 percent of Northerners. The South also increasingly lagged in other indications of modernization, from railroad construction to literacy and public education.

The biggest gap between North and South, however, was ideological. In the North, slavery was abolished and a small but articulate group of abolitionists developed. In the South, white spokesmen, from politicians to ministers, newspaper editors, and authors, rallied around slavery as the bedrock of Southern society. Defenders of slavery developed a wide range of arguments to defend their cause, from those based on race to those that stressed economic necessity. They made heavy use of religious themes, portraying slavery as part of God's plan for civilizing a primitive, heathen people.

Increasingly, however, Southern spokesmen based their case for slavery on social arguments. They contrasted the harmonious, orderly, religious, and conservative society that supposedly existed in the South with the tumultuous, heretical, and mercenary ways of a North torn apart by radical reform, individualism, class conflict, and, worst of all, abolitionism. This defense represented the mirror image of the so-called free-labor argument increasingly prevalent in the North: to the assertion that slavery kept the South backward, poor, inefficient, and degraded, proslavery advocates responded that only slavery could save the South from the evils of modernity run wild.

From the mid-1840s, the struggle over slavery became central to American politics. Northerners who were committed to free soil, the idea that new, western territories should be reserved exclusively for free white settlers, clashed repeatedly with Southerners who insisted that any limitation on slavery's expansion was unconstitutional meddling with the Southern order and a grave affront to Southern honor. In 1860 the election of Abraham Lincoln as president on a free-soil platform set off a major political and constitutional crisis, as seven states in the Deep South seceded from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America. The start of the Civil War between the United States and the Confederacy in April 1861 led to the additional secession of four states in the upper South. Four other slave states-Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri-remained in the Union, as did the new state of West Virginia, which split off from Virginia.

Ironically, although Southern politicians supported secession in order to preserve slavery, their action led instead to the end of slavery. As the war dragged on, Northern war aims gradually shifted from preserving the Union to abolishing slavery and remaking the Union. This goal, which received symbolic recognition with the Emancipation Proclamation that President Lincoln issued on January 1, 1863, became reality with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, passed by Congress in January and ratified by the states in December 1865. Although slavery was ended, it was followed by an intense struggle during Reconstruction over the status of the newly freed slaves. In subsequent decades, black Americans continued to struggle against poverty, racism, and segregation, as they sought to overcome the bitter legacy of slavery.

Brown, John (1800-1859), called Old Brown of Osawatomie, American abolitionist, whose attempt to end slavery by force greatly increased tension between North and South in the period before the American Civil War.

Brown was born in Torrington, Connecticut. His family moved to Ohio when he was five years old. Early in life he acquired the hatred of slavery that marked his subsequent career, his father having been actively hostile to the institution. While living in Pennsylvania in 1834, Brown initiated a project among sympathetic abolitionists to educate young blacks. The next 20 years of his life were largely dedicated to this and similar abolitionist ventures, entailing many sacrifices for himself and his large family. In 1855 he followed five of his sons to Kansas Territory, then a center of struggle between the antislavery and proslavery forces. Under Brown's leadership, his sons became active participants in the fight against proslavery terrorists from Missouri, whose activities led to the murder of a number of abolitionists at Lawrence, Kansas. Brown and his sons avenged this crime, on May 24, 1856, at Pottawatomie Creek by killing five proslavery adherents. This act, as well as his success in withstanding a large party of attacking Missourians at Osawatomie in August, made him nationally famous as an irreconcilable foe of slavery.

Aided by increased financial support from abolitionists in the northeastern states, Brown began in 1857 to formulate a plan, which he had long entertained, to free the slaves by armed force. He secretly recruited a small band of supporters for this project, which included the establishment of a refuge for fugitive slaves in the mountains of Virginia. After several setbacks, he finally launched the venture on October 16, 1859, with a force of 18 men (including several of his sons), seizing the United States arsenal and armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), and winning control of the town. After his initial success, he made no attempt at offensive action, but instead occupied defensive positions within the area. His force was surrounded by the local militia, which was reinforced on October 17 by a company of U.S. Marines under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee. Ten of Brown's men, including two of his sons, were killed in the ensuing battle, and he was wounded and forced to capitulate. He was arrested and charged with various crimes, including treason and murder. He distinguished himself during his trial, which took place before a Virginia court, by his eloquent defense of his efforts in behalf of the slaves. Convicted, he was hanged in Charlestown, Virginia (now West Virginia) in December 1859. For many years after his death, Brown was generally regarded among abolitionists as a martyr to the cause of human freedom. He became the subject of a famous song, known generally by the first line as "John Brown's body lies a-mould'ring in the grave."

This geographic knowledge opened the way for ordinary citizens to move across the country to the Far West. The area immediately west of the farming frontier, the Great Plains, offered little to farmers who were used to working on land with plentiful rainfall and having trees to build houses. Settlers traveled across the Great Plains to get to the Pacific Northwest, then called the Oregon country, which by the 1840s had a reputation as an agrarian paradise, where soil and climate would nearly guarantee a settler's health and prosperity. The central valleys of California were pictured in the same way. Oregon and California, however, were more than 2000 miles from Missouri, on the other side of plains, deserts, and the nation's two tallest mountain chains.

Nonetheless, beginning in the 1840s some people were willing to make the trek to their imagined promised land. Between 1841 and the late 1860s, more than a third of a million persons moved from the Missouri valley to the Pacific Coast. Most followed overland trails, including the Oregon and California trails. These two routes left Missouri and followed the Platte River through southwestern Wyoming, and then split. The Oregon Trail went northwest over the Blue and Cascade mountains to Oregon, and the California Trail went southwest over the Sierra Nevada to California. At first, most of those who traveled these trails were farming families who settled in what is now central California and along Oregon's Willamette valley. The former was part of Mexico, and the latter was claimed by both the United States and Great Britain. This migration extended the influence of the United States, which was soon to wrestle with Mexico and Britain for control of the land all the way to the Pacific.