The Role Of Slavery In The Civil War

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Slavery During the Civil War Slavery had been around way before the Civil War came along. When America was first colonized there was not enough people to satisfy the demand for labor. At first, there were white servants who paid their passage to the new world through labor. Clearly, that did not solve the problem because in the beginning of the seventeenth century a Dutch ship landed on America’s soil filled with African Americans. While this created a solution, it also created a new problem: African slave trade. The majority of the African’s that became slaves were prisoners of war. The prisoners were chained/roped together and marched all the way to the coast to be traded or sold by Europeans. After they were sold, the next challenge they …show more content…
A man named William Lloyd Garrison wrote for the Massachusetts newspaper and established an abolitionist newspaper called The Liberator. In the first issue of the newspaper he pointed out the rights listed in the Declaration of Independence and called for the end of slavery. These events led to the Underground Railroad. An escaped slave named Frederick Douglas established the office of the North Star. This newspaper office helped around four hundred fugitive slaves to escape during a ten year period. (Schneider 84) The Underground Railroad helped runaway slaves receive food and shelter. Canada became a popular place for escaped slaves to run to because the British Empire owned that territory and had outlawed slavery in 1833. Also, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to help owners of slaves in the South reclaim their runaways. The Fugitive Slave Act instigated bitter feelings between the Northerners and Southerners. Many events led up to the Civil War, but there were so many that occurred the decade before that caused the outbreak. (Schneider 84) Uncle Tom’s Cabin was one of those causes because it called attention to the cruelty of slavery. The people who had not cared/been concerned about slavery now took interest and hated it. This book caused Congress to pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed the people in Kansas and Nebraska to decide if they wanted to be a …show more content…
Slave life did not change much during the war. Many slaves fought in the North, but in the South that was not the case because slaves were not allowed to fight in the war because Southerners thought they would rebel and did not trust them with weapons. Congress passed the Confiscation Act of 1861 which claimed a slave’s former owner no longer had any legal right to them. The result of this act allowed slaves to work for the army or government agencies. A couple years later there were up to ten thousand blacks from Virginia and Maryland living and working in Washington, D.C. (Uschan 42) This did not happen in the south because southern whites feared slave revolts. In the Stono Rebellion about twenty slaves seized a store for guns. While the slaves were on the move they killed whites along the way. Eventually, the amount of slaves rebelling reached one hundred and the colonists finally fought back by killing thirty of the slaves and capturing the rest. Shorty after, whites in South Carolina passed the Negro Act. This act suppressed slaves even more and it banned slaves from meeting in groups or making money for themselves. (Pierce 12). There were many slaves that ran away and many were successful but some also got caught. Slaves would do anything and everything to escape like Henry Brown, who sent himself in a box to a man who opposed slavery. Brown sat in the small box
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