26/01/2022
THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
Historical Context
Slavery
The institution of slavery is older the United States government. Slaves were first
introduced to America in 1619 by the Dutch to the North American colony of Jamestown,
Virginia. During the early colonial period all the colonies permitted slavery. Most Northern
slaves worked as house servants, while Southern slaves worked on plantations. The slaves
provided a cheap labor force to produce and cultivate lucrative crops such as to***co. Some
historians estimate that 6 to 7 million slaves were imported to the New World during the 18th
century alone, depriving the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and
women. In the 17th and 18th centuries, holding slaves became less profitable in the North so it
was gradually abolished there, while slavery became vital to the to***co, rice and indigo
plantations of the southern coast. After the American Revolution, many colonists—particularly
in the North, where slavery was not an integral part of their economy—began to link the
oppression of Black slaves to their own oppression by the British, and called for slavery’s
abolition. However, after the war’s end, the new U.S. constitution enshrined slavery, counting
each slave as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress
and guaranteeing the right to repossess any “person held to service or labor.”
In the late 18th century, the land used to grow to***co was nearly exhausted creating an
economic crisis for the South, threatening the continued growth of slavery in America. This
coincided with the mechanization of the British textile industry, which created a huge demand
for cotton. Cotton’s production was limited by the difficulty of removing the seeds from raw
cotton fibers by hand, but in 1793, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. This device drasticaly. For more information
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