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Slavery was a divisive issue in the United States. It was a major issue during the writing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, the subject of political crises in the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850 and was the primary cause of the American Civil War in 1861. Just before the Civil War, there were 19 free states and 15 slave ...
The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States between the Union [e] ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), which was formed in 1861 by states that had seceded from the Union.
The American Civil War did not merely exist in isolation on the North American continent, the impact that slavery had during the war on the foreign relations of the United States of America was still significant, despite being a domestic war and slavery being a domestic issue, it had international consequences.
The border states of Maryland (November 1864) [16] and Missouri (January 1865), [17] and the Union-occupied Confederate state, Tennessee (January 1865), [18] all abolished slavery prior to the end of the Civil War, as did the new state of West Virginia (February 1865), [19] which had separated from Virginia in 1863 over the issue of slavery.
Enslaved people outnumbered free whites in South Carolina from the early 1700s to the Civil War. An authoritarian political culture evolved to prevent slave rebellion and justify white slaveholding. Northern slaves typically dwelled in towns, rather than on plantations as in the South, and worked as artisans and artisans' assistants, sailors ...
When the Civil War began, the Union did not state that its goals were civil rights and voting rights for African Americans, though the more radical of the abolitionists felt they had to come. They emerged as political goals during the war: the 13th Amendment , ending slavery, was proposed in 1863.
Later, in his seven-volume History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Civil War (1893–1900), James Ford Rhodes identified slavery as the central – and virtually only – cause of the Civil War. The North and South had reached positions on the issue of slavery that were both irreconcilable and unalterable.
Unshaded areas were not states before or during the Civil War. Historical military map of the border and southern states by Phelps & Watson, 1866. In the American Civil War (1861–65), the border states or the Border South were four, later five, slave states in the Upper South that primarily supported the Union.