THE PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

Along with physical resistance, political resistance to slavery expanded. The annexation of Texas in 1845 and the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848 made slavery into a national political issue. Many northerners in Congress supported Pennsylvania Representative David Wilmot’s attempt to restrict the expansion of slavery into the newly acquired Mexican territories. In the 1848 presidential elections, the newly formed Free Soil Party made antislavery a potent force in northern politics. Thus, thousands of readers were primed for the 1852 publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin . The novel was America’s first runaway bestseller, with some 300,000 copies being sold in twelve months.

The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 reignited the issue of slavery expansion into the west and led to a fierce and violent contest over the fate of Kansas between free state migrants and southern slaveholders. The antislavery and nonextensionist Republican Party was founded as a result of a new coalition between Free Soilers, Antislavery Whigs and Democrats, and political abolitionists. In the Dred Scott v. Sandford case of 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court essentially held that the Constitution did not curtail the rights of slaveholders to move their human property anyplace within the United States. The Court also declared that the rights enunciated in the Constitution did not apply to blacks because they were not American citizens. John Brown’s failed 1859 raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry made him into an abolitionist martyr. The question of slavery became a part of the famous 1858 debates between the antislavery Republican congressman Abraham Lincoln and the Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, who were running against each other for one of the Senate seats from Illinois. The debates made Lincoln a national figure and paved the way for his successful presidential campaign in 1860.

Lincoln’s election led to the secession of the states of the Deep South (South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Florida, and Louisiana), and the formation of the Confederacy would spell the doom of slavery. After the Confederates fired the first shot at Fort Sumter, inaugurating the American Civil War, four states from the Upper South (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas) seceded. Abolitionists such as Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass, as well as Radical Republicans in Congress, pressured President Lincoln to make the war for the Union a war against slavery. In 1863 Lincoln not only issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he also enlisted black men—some 130,000 of them former slaves—into the Union Army. In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution finally ended racial slavery in the United States. The war, which cost around 600,000 American lives, resulted in the emancipation of four million enslaved Americans of color. Millions more were peacefully freed when slavery was abolished in Puerto Rico in 1873, in Cuba in 1886, and in Brazil in 1888.

By the end of the nineteenth century, racial slavery had ended in the New World. Among the causes of its demise was a general belief that chattel slavery was both an outmoded and morally unacceptable labor system. The efforts of countless abolitionists and slaves also helped governments to end one of the worst instances of human bondage in world history.

Throughout the Western Hemisphere, even though slavery had ended, the problem of race continued to bedevil former slave societies. Only in the United States did the legacy of abolitionism live on beyond the end of slavery. Following the Civil War, the United States became the only slave society to adopt a policy of systemic reconstruction based on interracial democracy. Unfortunately, the U.S. Reconstruction era, which lasted from 1865 until 1875, was overthrown, and, just as in other former slave societies, freed persons were subjected to new coercions and relegated to second-class citizenship. With the start of the U.S. civil rights movement in the twentieth century, and similar struggles elsewhere, the abolitionist dream of creating a society based on racial justice re-emerged. In the 1960s, civil rights workers, recalling the long history of the struggle for black equality, called themselves “the new abolitionists.” Thus, while the abolitionists succeeded in ending slavery, if not racism, the legacy of their fight for racial justice lived on.