Slavery in America essays

Slavery in America essays In 1851 at ......... the United States of America engaged in its bloodiest war ever. This Civil War was fought on our own ground, between our own people, between Northerners and Southerners. Economics, Influential writings, and expansion may have fueled the war, but the main underlying cause for war was slavery. Slavery dominated the Southern economy. Demand for cotton exploded as the industrial revolution made the mass production of textiles possible. King Cotton reigned supreme, and cheap labor was needed more than ever to supply these demands. The southern economy invented the gang system to increase production on their plantations. It permitted a regimented pace of work that was overly harsh and crude to slaves. Although strongly opposed to the need for slavery in the souths economy, northerners were almost hypocrites in their beliefs. They employed intense cheap labor to poor immigrants entering the country. Influential writers like Hinton Rowan Helper blamed the souths economys use of slavery for their overall decline. Helper wrote The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, a collaboration of charts, statistics and graphs proving that slavery did not benefit the south but instead put it behind the production rate of the north. Other influential northern writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Lloyd Garrison wrote against the moral wrongs of slavery. Stowe wrote Uncle Toms Cabin portraying the slave as a humble, hardworking man and his owner as a brutal, cruel, dishonest slave owner. Southern and Northern tension increased as a result of this book because southerners felt that a woman for the North, who has never seen a first hand account of slavery shouldnt depict it so violent, so harsh, and so unjust and as she did. Garrison also was an abolitionist who published his own newspaper titled The Liberator condemning s...