then, universally, slavery had to be abolished so that the rights of slaveowners could be abolished. And that, inevitably, meant war.
The Least You Need to Know
The labor-intensive cultivation of cotton made the Southern economy dependent on slavery.
A series of compromises staved off civil war for three decades, as Northern opposition to slavery grew stronger and Southern advocacy of it became increasingly strident.
The Dred Scott decision made slavery an issue transcending individual states; therefore, it made compromise impossible-and civil war inevitable.
Word for the Day
Cotton gin sounds to us like a peculiar form of booze, but late 18th-century ears would have immediately recognized “gin” as a shortened from of “engine.” Two hundred years ago, a gin—or engine—was any labor-saving device, particularly one intended to help move heavy objects.
Real Life
The most famous “conductor” on the Underground Railroad was Harriet Tubman, a courageous, self- taught, charismatic escaped slave, single-minded in her dedication to freeing others. Born in Dorchester County, Maryland, about 1821, she escaped to freedom about 1849 by following the North Star. Not content with having achieved her own freedom, she repeatedly risked recapture throughout the 1850s by journeying into slave territory to lead some 300 other fugitives, including her parents, to freedom.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, Tubman volunteered her services as a Union army cook and nurse, then undertook hazardous duty as a spy and guide for Union forces in Maryland and Virginia. Capture would surely have meant death.
Following the war, Tubman operated a home in Auburn, New York, for aged and indigent African- Americans. She ran the facility until her death on March 10, 1913, when she was buried with full military honors.
Main Event
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96) was the daughter of a celebrated Congregationalist minister, Lyman Beecher, and the wife of biblical scholar Calvin Ellis Stowe. In 1843, she wrote her first book, Tile Mayflower; or, Sketches of Scenes and Characters among the Descendants of the Pilgrims, which revealed her familiarity with New England. However, living near Kentucky for a time acquainted her with the South. After Stowe and her husband moved to Brunswick, Maine, in 1850, the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law stirred memories of what she had seen of slavery.
Stowe began to write a book called Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, which was published serially in the National Era during 1852. The following year, the work came out in book form and created a tremendous popular sensation. With its vivid—and sentimental—scenes dramatizing the cruelty of slavery, the book shook the apathy out of many Northerners and enraged slaveholding Southerners. So powerful was the effect of the novel in the years preceding the Civil War that, when Abraham Lincoln met Mrs. Stowe during the conflict, he reportedly referred to her as “the little lady who wrote the book that made this big war.”
Looking West
(1834-1846)
White-Indian warfare continued as a seemingly chronic pastime, and the slavery issue was cracking the country’s foundation faster and more deeply than any number of flimsy compromises could patch. The United States during the first half of the 19th century seemed a violent place—especially when you add into the picture two major wars with foreign powers: the War of 1812 and the Mexican War.
Yet, as the old saw goes, everything’s relative. Between 1.800 and the 1850s, Europe was in an almost continual state of war, and despite their own problems, Americans, looking across the sea, counted themselves lucky. For America had one powerful peace-keeping asset Europe lacked: space. Seemingly endless space stretched beyond the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, across plains and desert, over more mountains, to the Pacific Ocean itself. Surely, America had room enough for everybody.
The Plow and the Reaper
Of course, land aplenty was one thing; actually living on it and using it could be quite another matter. In the Northeast, the American farm of the early 19th century was a family affair, providing enough food to feed the
