Half Slave And Half Free Summary

America’s transformation into the country we live in today has been formed through numerous events during its short history but the event that will split the United States into North versus South is truly one of the most defining events in American history. Through numerous events leading up to the start of the Civil War, I will attempt to show how the United States was destined for conflict and that the Civil War was inevitable. The first way I will show how the war could not be avoided will deal with the issue of slavery. Slavery should be the first mentioned because many conflicts within the United States leading up to the Civil War and the division of the United States dealt with slavery. The Missouri Compromise should also be talked

First is “the multiple meanings of slavery and freedom, and how they dissolved and re-formed into new patterns in the crucible of war” (viii). He discusses everything from politics, the military, society, and economics, but is constantly reminding the reader that slavery is essential to the start of the war. In spite the existence of a growing class of urban workers and immigrants, he stresses his belief that, “the greatest danger to American survival midcentury… was neither class tension nor ethnic division; rather it was sectional conflict between North and South over the future of slavery.” (7) Other historians believe that conflicts over tariff policies and state’s rights were more influential in the overall cause of war than slavery. (Battle Cry of

There has been many historians and theorists who have tackled colonial slavery. One of them is Ira Berlin whose book Many Thousands Gone is his take on slavery diversity in American history and how slavery is at the epicenter of economic production, amongst other things. He separates the book into three generations: charter, plantation and revolutionary, across four geographic areas: Chesapeake, New England, the Lower country and the lower Mississippi valley. In this paper, I will discuss the differences between the charter and plantation generations, the changes in work and living conditions, resistance, free blacks and changes in manumission.

As we already noted – in the 1800s expediency of slavery was disputed. While industrial North almost abandoned bondage, by the early 19th century, slavery was almost exclusively confined to the South, home to more than 90 percent of American blacks (Barney W., p. 61). Agrarian South needed free labor force in order to stimulate economic growth. In particular, whites exploited blacks in textile production. This conditioned the differences in economic and social development of the North and South, and opposing viewpoints on the social structure. “Northerners now saw slavery as a barbaric relic from the past, a barrier to secular and Christian progress that contradicted the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and degraded the free-labor aspirations of Northern society” (Barney W., p. 63).

In the time just before the Civil War, the United States was one of the most successful nations in the world. The United States had become the world’s leading cotton producing country and had developed industry, which would in the future, surpass that of Great Britain. Also, the United States possessed an advanced railroad and transportation system. However, despite its successes, the United States was becoming increasingly divided. The North and the South had many distinct differences in terms of their social, cultural, and economic characteristics that brought about sectionalism and, eventually, the Civil War.

The Civil War was a turning point in American history in that it completely change the dynamics of the economy across the Union. Although many Americans had to change due to the loss of slavery and the destruction of the Southern economy, those who had to adjust the most were the newly freed slaves under the 13th Amendment. The new freemen now had the opportunity, and the challenges involved, of achieving the American Dream of economic freedom with the help of the Freedmen’s Bureau, Northern Carpetbaggers, and intellectuals such as Paulo Freire, who felt it was their responsibility to help the freed blacks in their journey to economic prosperity.

In The Fate Of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, And The Coming Of The Civil War, Michael F. Holt effectively shows how the Civil War was caused by partisan politics and the slavery extension issue. The decisions made by northern and southern politicians from 1844 to 1861 in relation to the slavery extension issue caused the Civil War. I accept Holt’s thesis and believe that he makes a believable case. His book convinced me that foolish, selfish, and deceptive politicians made decisions that caused frustration in the lives of northern and southern Americans, which created an environment prone to civil war. It was not a disagreement over slavery itself, rather a disagreement over whether expansion into new territories would involve slavery.

During the Reconstruction period, American citizens heavily debated the terms of citizenship, as well as the rights that these citizens would enjoy. When Jefferson Davies and the Confederate armies surrendered in the spring of 1865, it became the Union’s responsibility to resolve the discord between the northern and southern states [Hahn 2005: 82]. The immediate postwar nation saw equally indeterminate statuses regarding the relation of the Ex-Confederate states to the Union, as well the relation of former slaves to the newly incorporated American citizenry. With the abolition of slavery, southerners were also curious as to what form of labor would replace that profitable industry. Each of these questions of unification, citizenship, labor,

In the early years of the 19th century, slavery was more than ever turning into a sectional concern, such that the nation had essentially become divided along regional lines. Based on economic or moral reasoning, people of the Northern states were increasingly in support of opposition to slavery, all the while Southerners became united to defend the institution of slavery. Brought on by profound changes including regional differences in the pattern of slavery in the upper and lower South, as well as the movement of abolitionism in the North, slavery in America had transformed from an issue of politics into a moral campaign during the period of 1815-1860, ultimately polarizing the North and the South to the point in which threats of a Southern disunion would mark the beginning of the Civil War in 1861 (Goldfield et. al, The American Journey, p. 281).

For the longest time in history states were always separated by their beliefs, some wanted slavery to exist and others didn’t so they split them up. The ones in the North did not feel slavery was useful to them while in the South they were the complete opposite, they wanted slavery to be around since people would work for free. The author Bruce Levine wrote the novel Half Slave and Half Free to inform the transformation throughout history and show us the differences between the two sections (North and South) and how their issues eventually brought us up to the civil war that almost tore America apart.

One of the most, if not the most, controversial and heated debates following the United States independence was regarding the institution of slavery. In the introduction to his book Half Slave and Half Free, Bruce Levine quotes Carl Schurzs’ observation as the “slave question not being a mere occasional quarrel between two sections of the country divided by a geographic line, but a great struggle between two antagonistic systems of social organization (p.15)”. The Nouthern states that allowed slavery benefited from the agricultural labor that those slaves provided. The Northern states that prohibited slavery did so for moral and pragmatic reasons; they felt it was morally wrong to deny another human any form of rights, and did not like the economic advantage it gave to the Southern states. With the use of slavery largely concentrated in the South, the movement against it came from the North and was led by abolitionists; those who were committed to bringing an end to the practice. In this course we have defined “Practice” as the conduct of policy, such as opinion, election, parties and law-making (Lecture). We define Policy as the goals of politics, those being sovereignty, defense, and a collective well-being (Lecture). The following analytical essay will examine antislavery sentiment and practices in the Northern states and the reaction of Southern states. Additionally how the pressures from both sides influenced the Policy of the United States following independence then

“The impact of slavery on the South’s social system, value system, and political system. Despite the distance between slave-owners and non-slave-owners, the South for a variety of reasons had been relatively free of class conflict. But between 1830 and 1860, the hardening of class lines and the widening of the gap between rich and poor began to create more tension between slaveholders and non-slaveholders, tension evidenced in white workers’ protests and in the publication of The Impending Crisis in 1857.” (People and Communities in a Slave Society: The South, 1830–1860, n.d)

Bruce Levine’s Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War is an incredibly complex and informative book that delves into the events leading up to the War, starting with the birth of the United States, and what really was behind it.

Without the issue of slavery there would have been no war. It threw into doubt the very meaning of American freedom. To Southerners the greatest freedom they could enjoy was taking their property- their slaves – into every corner of the country, even where slavery had previously been outlawed. The Southern emphasis on ‘states’ rights’ was essentially a coded phase for the defence of slavery – the South’s ‘peculiar institution’. The South did not go to war in defence of the right of its state governments to charter banks. During the 1840s a pro-slavery ideology grew up arguing that, by comparison with the brutality of industrial urban civilization, paternal rural slavery was a positive good. After the Compromise of 1850, slavery had made some advances and Southerners demanded not only that they should have the right to take their slaves into the domain of territory seized from Mexico after the war of 1846-8, but that Kansas should enter the Union as a slave state. The desultory violence that accompanied these demands provoked the growth of the anti-slavery Republican Party, which sought to restrict slavery to its existing limits. The depression of 1857, which hit the more industrial North harder, inspired the South with an exaggerated idea of the economic strength of ‘King Cotton’ grown by its system of slave-based plantations. When the Crimean War came to an end in 1857 the loss of new European markets for Northern cereals, previously supplied by Russia, added to the economic depression and darkened and atmosphere already marred by a sense of domestic

The slave markets were highly profitable for the southern population Engerman notes slaves were priced on the basis of their expected profitability. By the 1790’s the “country was clearly divided into two sections, one slave and one primarily free” (Engerman 370). These cultural differences between the Northern and Southern states set the stage for the inevitable American Civil War. This paper examines the events, which predicted the certainty of the U.S. Civil War and the uncertainty of the Union’ s victory.