The Civil War is still being fought at FR

Caption: This poster depicting the horrific conditions on slave ships was influencial in mobilizing public opinion against slavery in Great Britain and the United States.

Abolition worldwide
Slavery was abolished in these nations in these years:

* Sweden: 1335 (but not until 1847 in the colony of St. Barthélemy)
* Haiti: 1791, due to a revolt among nearly half a million slaves
* Gran Colombia (Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, and Venezuela): 1821, through a gradual emancipation plan
* Chile: 1823
* Mexico: 1829
* Denmark: 1848, including all colonies

"This country is inhabited by saints, sinners and Beechers."
Dr. Leonard Bacon, c.1863

Families that have been influential in American life and culture are often recognizable by their signature names. The Beecher family is an example of one such family whose deep religious convictions and social conscience spanned the nineteenth century and made them prominent historical figures whose impact on religion, education, abolition, reform movements, literature and public life were exceptional. Biographer Milton Rugoff claims that in "two generations the Beechers emerged, along with many other Americans, from a God-centered, theology-ridden world concerned with the fate of man's eternal soul into a man-centered society occupied mainly with life on earth."

Her closest confidant was her brother Henry, and throughout their lives they united in speaking out against the evils of slavery.

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" and influences on American culture

American fiction up to the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was based on the fantasies of writers like Poe and Irving, and the romantic visions of authors such as James Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne and Melville. In addition, the women publishing in the first half of the nineteenth century wrote sentimental novels appealing to their female audience. Milton Rugoff says: "At her best, Harriet Beecher Stowe was the first American realist of any consequence and the first to use fiction for a profound criticism of American society, especially its failure to live up to promises of democracy."

Reaction to the publication of the book took many forms and inspired plays, music, art, and anti-Tom literature. In 1852 there was actually a "Tom-mania" with Americans singing or playing Uncle Tom Songs and soon a stage version was produced with performances in New York, Boston and London.

The book received international recognition as a plea for the moral cause of abolition and is recognized today as a landmark in the history of American culture as well as American literature.

Origins of the conflict.

On the eve of the Civil War, the United States was a nation divided into four quite distinct regions: the Northeast, with a growing industrial and commercial economy and an increasing density of population; the Northwest, now known as the Midwest, a rapidly expanding region of free farmers where slavery had been forever prohibited under the Northwest Ordinance; the Upper South, with a settled plantation system and (in some areas) declining economic fortunes; and the Southwest, a booming frontier-like region with an expanding cotton economy. With two fundamentally different labor systems at their base, the economic and social changes across the nation's geographical regions – based on wage labor in the North and on slavery in the South – underlay distinct visions of society that had emerged by the mid-nineteenth century in the North and in the South.

Before the Civil War, the Constitution provided a basis for peaceful debate over the future of government, and had been able to regulate conflicts of interest and conflicting visions for the new, rapidly expanding nation. For many years, compromises had been made to balance the number of "free states" and "slave states" so that there would be a balance in the Senate. The last slave state admitted was Texas in 1845, with five free states admitted between 1846 and 1859. The admission of Kansas as a slave state had recently been blocked, and it was due to enter as a free state instead in 1861. The rise of mass democracy in the industrializing North, the breakdown of the old two-party system, and increasingly virulent and hostile sectional ideologies in the mid-nineteenth century made it highly unlikely, if not impossible, to bring about the gentlemanly compromises of the past (such as the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850) necessary to avoid crisis.

Sectional tensions changed in their nature and intensity rapidly during the 1850s. The United States Republican Party was established in 1854. The new party opposed the expansion of slavery in the Western territories. Although only a small share of Northerners favored measures to abolish slavery in the South, the Republicans were able to mobilize popular support among Northerners and Westerns who did not want to compete against slave labor if the system were expanded beyond the South. The Republicans won the support of many ex-Whigs and Northern ex-Democrats concerned about the South's disproportionate influence in the Senate, the Buchanan administration, and the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, the profitability of cotton, or "King Cotton," as it was touted, solidified the South's dependence on the plantation system and its foundation: slave labor. A small class of slave barons, especially cotton planters, dominated the politics and society of the South.

Southern secession was triggered by the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was a moderate in his opposition to slavery. He pledged to do all he could to oppose the expansion of slavery into the territories (thus also preventing the admission of any additional slave states to the Union); but he also said the federal government did not have the power to abolish slavery in the states in which it already existed, and that he would enforce Fugitive Slave Laws. The southern states expected increasing hostility to their "peculiar institution"; not trusting Lincoln, and mindful that many other Republicans were intent on complete abolition of slavery. Lincoln had even encouraged abolitionists with his 1858 "House divided" speech<2>, though that speech was also consistent with an eventual end of slavery achieved gradually and voluntarily with compensation to slave-owners and resettlement of former slaves.

In addition to Lincoln's presidential victory, the slave states had lost the balance of power in the Senate and were facing a future as a perpetual minority after decades of nearly continuous control of the presidency and the Congress. Southerners also felt they could no longer prevent protectionist tariffs such as the Morrill Tariff, which generally placed a greater burden upon the South.

The Southern justification for a unilateral right to secede cited the doctrine of states' rights, which had been debated before with the 1798 Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, the Hartford Convention during the War of 1812, and the 1832 Nullification Crisis with regard to tariffs.

Before Lincoln took office, seven states seceded from the union, establishing a rebel government, the Confederate States of America on February 9, 1861. They took control of federal forts and property within their boundaries, with little resistance from President Buchanan. Ironically, by seceding, the rebel states weakened any claim to the territories that were in dispute, cancelled any obligation for the North to return fugitive slaves, and assured easy passage of many bills and amendments they had long opposed. The Civil War began when Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire upon Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina on April 12, 1861. There were no casualties from enemy fire in this battle.

Cinqué, once returned to Africa, is often said to have set himself up as a slave trader. No surviving documentation supports this claim and opinion among reputable historians seems to range from 'not proven' to 'presumed innocent'. What little evidence we have are oral accounts from Africa and a claim by William A. Owens to have seen letters, written by AMA missionaries, suggesting that Cinqué was a slave trade