Confederate Reckoning

The secession of the Southern states was the culmination of a long conflict over enslavement that began even before the founding of the United States. When Europeans colonized the Americas, they began importing enslaved people from Africa, mainly for agricultural labor. These people were forced to work on labor-intensive cash crops like sugar, cotton, and tobacco. In the southern United States, cotton was especially profitable and became a major part of the South’s economy. The more rural, agricultural South depended on enslavement far more than the more urbanized and industrial North. As enslavement developed as an economic system in what would become the United States, race-based enslavement and discriminatory treatment of all people of African descent were encoded into law, starting with the 1662 Slave Code in Virginia and the 1685 Code Noir in French Louisiana. At the same time, racist ideas about African-Americans were increasingly solidified through 18th-century pseudo-science and invoked to justify the continuation of enslavement.

With the American Revolution and the establishment of the United States, the writers of the US Constitution were forced to incorporate the interests of the slaveholding planter class who tended to dominate politics in the South. This resulted in the Three-Fifths Compromise, which allowed slaveholding states to count their enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of political representation. In the decades after the American Revolution, as the Northern states outlawed enslavement and the social, cultural, and economic differences between the North and the South deepened, enslavement became a more intense issue of contention. This continued even after the United States outlawed the trade of enslaved people in 1808. In the US Congress, abolitionists from the North called for outlawing enslavement nationwide, while Southern politicians pushed for expanding enslavement into the new Western states and territories to sustain a national pro-enslavement voting bloc in Congress. As the United States expanded further westward, such debates became more intense and attempts at compromise failed. Even by 1854, years before the US Civil War began, violence broke out between pro-enslavement and anti-enslavement settlers in Kansas and parts of western Missouri in a series of skirmishes called “Bleeding Kansas.”