Henry Lee III, called "Light Horse Harry", was a cavalry officer in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. He was the Governor of Virginia and a U.S. Congressman as well as the father of American Civil War general Robert E. Lee. Lee was born in 1756 near Dumfries, Virginia, the son of Maj. Gen. Henry Lee II and Lucy Grymes. His father was first cousin once removed to Richard Henry Lee, sixth President of the Continental Congress. His mother was an aunt of the wife of Virginia Governor Thomas Nelson Jr. His great-grandmother Mary Bland was a great-aunt of President Thomas Jefferson and he descended once from King John of England, twice from King Edward I of England, once from King Jean de Brienne of Jerusalem, twice from King Edward III of England and once from King Pedro I of Castile. With a view to a legal career, he graduated in 1773 from The College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) but soon afterward at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, he became a captain in the revolutionary forces. In 1776, he was promoted to captain of a Virginia dragoon detachment, which was attached to the 1st Continental Light Dragoons and in 1778 he was promoted to major and given the command of a small irregular corps with which he won a great reputation as a leader of light troops. His services on the outpost line of the army earned for him the nickname "Light Horse Harry". His greatest exploit was the brilliant surprise at the Battle of Paulus Hook in New Jersey on August 19, 1779; for this feat he received a gold medal, a reward given to no other officer below a general's rank in the entire war. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel with a picked corps of dragoons (Lee's Legion) to the southern theater of war. Here he rendered invaluable services in victory and defeat, notably at Guilford Court House, Camden and Eutaw Springs. He was present at Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown and soon left the army due to ill health. During the Whiskey Rebellion, Lee commanded 13,000 militiamen sent to quash the rebels. In 1782 he married his second-cousin, Matilda Ludwell Lee, the daughter of Hon. Philip Ludwell Lee Sr.and Elizabeth Steptoe. Martha Lee died in 1790 and on June 13, 1793, Henry Lee married the wealthy Anne Hill Carter (17 years his junior) at Shirley Plantation. They had six children, one of whom died in infancy in 1796. Their fifth child, Robert Edward Lee, would later gain fame as a Confederate general during the Civil War. Unfortunately for Lee and his family, he invested large sums in numerous, highly speculative schemes, including partnerships with Aaron Burr and merchant Robert Morris. Although financial speculation was not rare among the Founding Fathers, Lee's handling of his personal finances was notably incompetent and subjected his family to financial hardship. In 1810, to meet the demands of his creditors and be released from debtor’s prison, Lee was forced to sell all of his possessions. He instead took what he could from the house and left his family behind to pay the debts he owed. On July 27, 1812, Lee received grave injuries while helping to resist an attack on his friend, Alexander Contee Hanson, editor of the Baltimore newspaper, The Federal Republican. Hanson was attacked by a Democratic-Republican mob because his paper opposed the War of 1812. Lee and Hanson and two dozen other Federalists had taken refuge in the offices of the paper. The group surrendered to Baltimore city officials the next day and were jailed. Laborer George Woolslager led a mob that forced its way into the jail and removed and beat the Federalists over the next three hours. Lee suffered extensive internal injuries as well as head and face wounds and even his speech was affected. Lee later sailed to the West Indies in an effort to recuperate from his injuries. He died on March 25, 1818, at Dungeness on Cumberland Island, Georgia.
On November 17, 1840, John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States, and then serving in Congress, visited thirty-six African men being held outside of New Haven, Connecticut. The Africans who had mutinied on the Spanish slave ship Amistad were being tried for piracy and murder on the high seas. Adams's involvement as a former President, and perhaps even more significantly as the son of one of the nation's most important Founding Fathers, marked an important point in United States history. Here at last was an almost direct connection between the cause of antislavery and the nation's Revolutionary principles of liberty and equality.
The thirty-six Africans had been among five or six hundred purchased by a Portuguese slave trader in April 1839. They were shipped to Havana, Cuba, then a Spanish colony. Although slavery was legal in many countries, the international slave trade had been banned by laws and treaties in nations such as Great Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United States. Nevertheless, a prosperous slave trade continued and few traders were caught. The Africans were landed near Havana and sold openly in the slave market. Fifty-two members of the Mendi tribe, from present-day Nigeria, who survived the horrors of the Middle Passage were sold to Jose Ruiz and Pedro Montez, two Cubans who planned to sell them to a Cuban sugar plantation. The Mendians were given Spanish names and designated as "black ladinos," indicating that they had lived in the country long enough to know the language and customs. Utilizing the deception that the Mendians had been long-term slaves in Cuba, Ruiz and Montez placed them on board the schooner Amistad and set sail for a port down the Cuban coast on June 28, 1839. On the fourth night out, the Mendians broke free of their chains, seized machetes, and waited until morning. At dawn, they attacked the captain and his three-man crew. Their leader, given the Spanish name Cinque, killed the captain; the cook was also killed. Two members of the crew escaped in the ship's boat; the cabin boy, an actual ladino, was not harmed. The two Cuban slavers, spared on the promise that they would take the vessel back to Africa, steered east to Africa by day, but turned the ship toward the United States by night, hoping to make some friendly southern port. On August 26, the Amistad, its provisions exhausted, was apprehended off Long Island by a U.S. Coastal Survey brig and taken to New London, Connecticut. Ruiz and Montez immediately denounced the Mendians as revolted slaves, pirates, and murderers, and claimed them as their property. The Mendians, who did not speak English or Spanish and thus could not communicate with anyone, were brought before a federal judge, who set a trial date. The Spanish ambassador became involved, demanding that President Martin Van Buren return the ship and the Mendians to Ruiz and Montez and that the whole matter be dealt with under Spanish law as treaty obligations stipulated. Van Buren agreed, preferring to return the Mendians and in so doing not alienate his southern proslavery support, but the matter had already been placed under court jurisdiction. At this point, three prominent abolitionists intervened: Lewis Tappan, a merchant and industrialist who had raised funds to defend and care for the Mendians; the Reverend Joshua Leavitt, editor of the antislavery journal Emancipator; and Simeon S. Jocelyn, an engraver active in the antislavery movement. After obtaining legal counsel, the abolitionists found a translator to take testimony from the Mendians; they learned they had been kidnapped, were in Cuba only a few days, and thus were not ladinos. The Mendians' testimony became the basis of the defense's case. On January 7, 1840, the Mendians' trial began in the District Court in Hartford, Connecticut. Tappan, aided by a British commissioner stationed in Havana to help suppress the illegal slave trade, uncovered evidence to support the Mendians' story: the documents establishing them as ladinos were forged. The judge, persuaded by this evidence, concluded that even under Spanish law the Mendians were free men and ordered President Van Buren to have them transported back to Africa. Interestingly, the court also determined that the cabin boy, the ladino, was a slave, the property of Ruiz and Montez, and should be returned to his owners. With the aid of the abolitionists, however, he fled to New York and to freedom. Van Buren, furious and worried that this case would damage his standing in the South, ordered the government's lawyers to appeal the case to the Supreme Court. For their part, the abolitionists determined to add an eminent lawyer to augment the defense team. After being turned down by leading trial lawyers in Boston, Tappan then approached John Quincy Adams, who after some hesitation agreed. Adams was merely a lukewarm supporter of abolitionism and had even angered Tappan by his refusal to support the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. He had become interested in the Amistad case when it was tried in the District Court but Tappan had rejected his initial offer of assistance. The case went before the Supreme Court on February 22, 1841; Adams considered the date of George Washington's birthday a good omen. Adams's argument, extending over two days and lasting seven hours, centered on what he considered to be the cornerstone of Anglo-American rights and liberties, the principle of habeas corpus. By Spain's own laws, he argued, the Mendians were illegally enslaved. If the President could hand over free men on the demand of a foreign government, how could any man, woman, and child in the United States ever be sure of their "blessing of freedom"? The Court, with one dissent, agreed. However, while the Court's decision was a moral victory for the abolitionist cause, it did not address either the legality of slavery or the status of runaway slaves in America. By the time the Court rendered its decision, John Tyler, a southern proslavery Whig, was President; he refused to provide a warship for the Mendians' return. In December 1841, Tappan and his fellow abolitionists provided a ship and missionaries who would accompany the Africans home. Cinque returned to become a chief of his people. While stories persist that he became a slave trader, there is no documentation to support this claim. In 1878, near death, Cinque returned to the mission and died a Christian.
The history of the United States has produced much in the way of race riots, from the New York City riots of 1862 to the Los Angeles riots of 1991, this country has experienced much civil unrest between blacks and whites. The year 1919 was particularly noted for the large number of riots in the urban areas of the North where returning white veterans of World War I competed with Southern Blacks for jobs during the post-war depression. The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 was perhaps the costliest incident of racial violence in American history. The riot began on May, 31, 1921, because of an incident the day before. A black man named Dick Rowland, stepped into an elevator in the Drexel Building operated by a woman named Sarah Page. Suddenly, a scream was heard and Rowland got nervous and ran out. Rowland was accused of a sexual attack against Page. One version of the incident holds that Rowland stepped on Page's foot, throwing her off balance. When Rowland reached out to keep her from falling, she screamed. The next day, Rowland was arrested and held in the courthouse lockup. Headlines in the local newspapers inflamed public opinion and there was talk in the white community of lynch justice. The black community, equally incensed, prepared to defend him. Outside the courthouse, 75 armed black men mustered, offering their services to protect Rowland. The Sheriff refused the offer.
A white man then tried to disarm one of the black men. While they were wrestling over the gun, it discharged. That was the spark the turned the incident into a massive racial conflict. Fighting broke out and continued through the night. Homes were looted and burned. Though they were outnumbered 10 to 1, blacks, many of whom were veterans of World War I, started to form battles lines and dig trenches. The conflict shifted to the northern part of Tulsa in the Frisco tracks area. The Tulsa police force was too small to stop the rioters, so Mayor T. D. Evans asked the governor to send in the National Guard. While the National Guard was on its way to Tulsa, whites set fire to houses and stores. Fire companies could not fight the fire because rioters drove them away. On June 1,1921, a big cloud of smoke covered the northern part of Tulsa. Later that morning, the last stand of the conflict occurred at foot of Standpipe Hill. According to the Tulsa Tribune, the National Guard mounted two machine guns and fired into the area. The black groups surrendered and were disarmed. They were taken in columns to Convention Hall, the McNulty Baseball Park, the Fairgrounds, and to a flying field. Some survivors later alleged that planes were involved in the destruction of Greenwood City. Many black residents left Tulsa to the Osage Hills and its surrounding towns. According to an official estimate 10 whites and 26 blacks were killed. However, later reports, never verified, raised that number to 300 killed. After the riot had ended relief started to come to the survivors, especially from the American Red Cross. Hospitals treated the wounded; food and clothing was given out; people received temporary shelters to live in while their houses were rebuilt. It took the better part of the next ten years to recover from the physical destruction and to rebuild and repatriate the residents their homes. And as for Dick Rowland? Charges against him arising out of the incident in the elevator were never brought.
Henry McCarty, also known as William Henry Bonney was born on November 23, 1859, most likely in New York City. History then traces Billy to Indiana in the late 1860s and Wichita, Kansas, in 1870. His father died around the end of the Civil War and at about the same time Billy's mother contracted tuberculosis and was told to move to a drier climate. On March 1, 1873, she married a man named William Antrim, who moved the family to Silver City, New Mexico. His stepfather worked as a bartender and carpenter but soon got the prospecting bug and virtually ignored his wife and stepsons. Faced with an indigent husband, McCarty's mother took in boarders in order to provide for her sons. Despite the better climate, Billy's mother continued to worsen and on September 16, 1874, she died of her condition. After her death, Antrim placed Billy and his younger brother Joseph in separate foster homes and left Silver City for Arizona. At age 14, the smooth-cheeked, blue-eyed McCarty was forced to find work in a hotel, washing dishes and waiting tables at the restaurant. The manager was impressed by the young boy, boasting that he was the only kid who ever worked for him that didn't steal anything. His school teachers thought that the young orphan was "no more of a problem than any other boy, always quite willing to help with chores around the schoolhouse". However, on September 23, 1875, McCarty was arrested for hiding a bundle of stolen clothes for a man playing a prank on a Chinese laundryman. Two days after Billy was thrown in jail, the scrawny teen escaped by worming his way up the jailhouse chimney. From that point onward McCarty would be a fugitive. He eventually found work as an itinerant ranch hand and sheepherder in southeastern Arizona. In 1877 he became a civilian teamster at Camp Grant Army Post with the duty of hauling logs from a timber camp to a sawmill. The civilian blacksmith at the camp, Frank "Windy" Cahill, took pleasure in bullying young Billy. On August 17 Cahill attacked McCarty after a verbal exchange and threw him to the ground. Billy retaliated by drawing his gun and shooting Cahill, who died the next day. Once again McCarty was in custody, this time in the Camp's guardhouse awaiting the arrival of the local marshal. Before the marshal could arrive, however, Billy escaped. Again on the run, Billy next turned up in the house of Heiskell Jones in Pecos Valley, New Mexico. Apaches had stolen McCarty's horse which forced him to walk many miles to the nearest settlement, which was Mrs. Jones' house. She nursed the young man, who was near death, back to health. The Jones family developed a strong attachment to Billy and gave him one of their horses. Now an outlaw and unable to find honest work, he met up with another bandit named Jesse Evans, who was the leader of a gang of rustlers called "The Boys.” Billy didn't have anywhere else to go and since it was unwise to be alone in the hostile and lawless territory, he reluctantly joined the gang. Billy later became embroiled in the infamous Lincoln County War in which his newest friend and employer, John Tunstall, was killed on February 18, 1878. Billy was deeply affected by the murder, claiming that Tunstall was one of the only men that treated him like he was "free-born and white." Billy would enact revenge by gunning-down the deputy who killed his friend, as well as another deputy and the County Sheriff, William Brady. Now an even more wanted man than before, Billy went into hiding but soon started to steal livestock from white ranchers and Apaches on the Mescalero reservation. In the fall of 1878, retired Union General Lew Wallace became the new territorial governor of New Mexico. In order to restore peace to Lincoln County, Wallace proclaimed an amnesty for any man involved in the Lincoln County War that was not already under indictment. Billy was, of course, under several indictments (some of which unrelated to the Lincoln County War) but Wallace was intrigued by rumors that Billy was willing to surrender himself and testify against other combatants if amnesty could be extended to him. In March 1879 Wallace and Billy met to discuss the possibility of a deal. True to form, Billy greeted the governor with a revolver in one hand and a Winchester rifle in the other. After several days to think the issue over, Billy agreed to testify in return for amnesty. Part of the agreement was for Billy to submit to a show arrest and a short stay in jail until the conclusion of his courtroom testimony. Even though his testimony helped to indict one of the powerful House faction leaders, John Dolan, the district attorney defied Wallace's order to set Billy free after testifying. However, Billy was a skilled escape artist and slipped out of his handcuffs and fled. For the next year he hung around Fort Sumner on the Pecos River and developed a fateful friendship with a local bartender named Pat Garrett who was later elected sheriff of Lincoln County. As sheriff, Garrett was charged with arresting his friend Henry McCarty, who by now was almost exclusively known as "Billy the Kid". At about the same time, Billy had formed a gang, referred to as the "Rustlers" or simply Billy the Kid's Gang, who he survived by stealing and rustling as he did before. Soon, the determined Garrett and his posse tracked the outlaws down to Stinking Springs and surrounded their hideout. The siege continued until the next day, when the bandits surrendered. Billy the Kid and his gang of "Rustlers" were captured on December 23, 1880, and taken to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Billy was jailed in the town of Mesilla while waiting for his April 1881 trial. Deliberation took exactly one day and Billy was convicted of murdering Sheriff William Brady and sentenced to hang by Judge Warren Bristol. His execution was scheduled for May 13th and he was sent to Lincoln to await this date. He was under guard by James Bell and Robert Ollinger on the top floor of the building formerly known as the House before and during the Lincoln County War. On April 28 Billy somehow escaped and killed both of his guards while Garrett was out of town. It is not known how Billy was able to do this, but it is widely believed that a friend or Regulator sympathizer left a pistol in the privy that one of the guards escorted Billy to daily. After shooting Deputy Bell with the pistol, Billy stole Ollinger's 10-gauge double barrel shotgun and waited for Ollinger by the window in the room he was being held in. Ollinger obliged by running immediately from the hotel upon hearing the shots. When he was directly under the window of the courthouse, he heard his prisoner say, "Hello, Bob." Ollinger then looked up and saw the Kid gun in hand. It was the last thing he ever saw as Billy blasted him with his own shotgun killing him instantly. This would be, however, Billy's last escape. When Pat Garrett was questioning Billy's friend Peter Maxwell on July 14, 1881, in Maxwell's darkened bedroom in Old Fort Sumner, Billy unexpectedly entered the room. The Kid didn't recognize Garrett in the poor lighting conditions and asked "¿Quien es? ¿Quien es?" (Spanish for "Who is it? Who is it?), to which Garrett responded with two shots from his revolver, the first striking Billy's heart. Henry McCarty, the infamous "Billy the Kid", was buried in a plot the next day at Fort Sumner's cemetery.
As the population of the colony of Pennsylvania grew, so did the need for an official building to house the colony's government body, the Pennsylvania Assembly. Construction of the State House (now known as Independence Hall) began in 1732. Part of the construction order included the making of a bell tower on the building's south side. When the steeple work was completed in early 1751 a bell was hung in the new tower. Unfortunately, this bell could not be heard throughout all parts of Philadelphia and it was decided that a new bell was needed. The Pennsylvania Assembly Speaker and Chairman of the State House Superintendents, Isaac Norris, contacted the Assembly's London agent, Robert Charles, by letter asking him to purchase a "good bell of about two thousand pounds weight" and included instructions for the inscription on the Bell. Charles commissioned the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in England under the direction of master founder, Thomas Lester, on November 1, 1751. The bell arrived in America in late August 1752, nearly one year later.
The new bell was set up in Independence Square to be tested prior to being hung in the new tower. The bell cracked on its very first test! Isaac Norris is quoted, "I had the mortification to hear that it was cracked by a stroke of the clapper without any further violence as it was hung up to try the sound." The bell's metal was too brittle to sustain even one stroke of the clapper. Local Philadelphia founders, John Pass and John Stow, were commissioned to recast the Whitechapel bell and strengthen its composition. The original bell was broken down and recast with additional metals added to it. In March of 1753, the newly recast bell was tested and hung in the tower of the State House. While this new bell was stronger, Philadelphians did not like the sound of the new bell. Pass and Stow were asked to recast the bell again.
Pass and Stow completed the second recasting in June 1753 and the Bell was again hung in the tower. The new Bell was still of questionable sound in some minds; however, it was deemed acceptable and it is this bell that eventually became known as the Liberty Bell. It is uncertain how the bell came to be cracked; the damage occurred sometime between 1817 and 1846. The bell is mentioned in a number of newspaper articles during that time; no mention of a crack can be found until 1846. In fact, in 1837 the bell was depicted in an anti-slavery publication uncracked. In February 1846 Public Ledger reported that the bell had been rung on February 23, 1846, in celebration of Washington's Birthday and also reported that the bell had long been cracked, but had been "put in order" by having the sides of the crack filed. The paper reported that around noon it was discovered that the ringing had caused the crack to be greatly extended, and that "the old Independence Bell...now hangs in the great city steeple irreparably cracked and forever dumb". The most common story about the cracking of the bell is that it happened when the bell was rung upon the 1835 death of the Chief Justice of the United States, John Marshall. This story originated in 1876, when the volunteer curator of Independence Hall, Colonel Frank Etting, announced that he had ascertained the truth of the story. While there is little evidence to support this view, it has been widely accepted and taught. Other claims regarding the crack in the bell include stories that it was damaged while welcoming Lafayette on his return to the United States in 1824, that it cracked announcing the passing of the British Catholic Relief Act 1829, and that some boys had been invited to ring the bell and inadvertently damaged it. The Liberty Bell weighs 2,080 pounds. The circumference around the lip (bottom) of the Bell is 12 feet and around the crown (top) is 7 feet 6 inches. From the lip to the crown measures 3 feet and the height over the crown measures 2 feet 3 inches. The thickness of the Liberty Bell at the lip is 3 inches and at the crown the thickness is 1.25 inches. The length of the clapper is 3 feet 2 inches and weighs 44.5 pounds. The yoke weighs 200 pounds and its wood is Slippery Elm. A metallurgical analysis of the Liberty Bell shows the composition to be approximately 70% copper, 25% tin, 2% lead, 1% zinc, .25% arsenic and .20% silver with trace amounts of gold, magnesium, nickel and antimony. The elements are found in differing ratios throughout the Liberty Bell suggesting that the casters, Pass and Stow, did not have a large enough furnace to melt down all the pieces of the Bell at one time during recasting, but used small crucibles to complete the project.
The American capitalist Cornelius Vanderbilt was born near Stapleton, Staten Island, New York, in 1794. He was a descendant of Jan Aersten Van der Bilt who emigrated from Holland about 1650 and settled near Brooklyn. The family removed to Staten Island in 1715. At the age of 16 Vanderbilt bought a sailboat in which he carried farm produce and passengers between Staten Island and New York. He was soon doing a profitable carrying business and in 1813 carried supplies to fortifications in New York Harbor and the adjacent waters. Recognizing the superiority of steam over sailing vessels, he sold his sloops and schooners and from 1817 to 1829 Vanderbilt was a captain on a steam ferry between New York and New Brunswick.
In 1857 he sold his steamships and turned his attention to the development of railways. In 1857 he became a director, and in 1863 president, of the New York & Harlem Railway Company, operating a line between New York and Chatham Four Corners, in Columbia County. He then acquired a controlling interest in the Hudson River Railway, of which he became president in 1865; and after a sharp struggle in 1868 he became president of the New York Central (between Albany and Buffalo), which in 1869 he combined with the Hudson River Railroad, under the name of the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad, of which he became president. His acquisition of the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern railway in 1873 established a through line (controlled by him) between New York and Chicago. At the time of his death in New York City in 1877, Vanderbilt owned a majority interest in the New York Central & Hudson River, the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, the Harlem, and the Canada Southern Railways, had holdings in many others, and his fortune was variously estimated at from $90 million to $100 million, about $80 million of which he left to his son, William Henry Vanderbilt.
Slavery in America began when the first African slaves were brought to the North American colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, to aid in the production of such lucrative crops as tobacco. Slavery was practiced throughout the American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries and African-American slaves helped build the economic foundations of the new nation. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 solidified the central importance of slavery to the South's economy. By the mid 19th century America's westward expansion, along with a growing abolition movement in the North, would provoke a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody Civil War from 1861 to 1865. Though the Union victory freed the nation's four million slaves, the legacy of slavery continued to influence American history, from the tumultuous years of Reconstruction to the civil rights movement that emerged in the 1960s, a century after emancipation. In the early 17th century, European settlers in North America turned to African slaves as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than indentured servants (who were mostly poorer Europeans). After 1619, when a Dutch ship brought twenty Africans ashore at the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia, slavery spread throughout the American colonies. Though it is impossible to give accurate figures, some historians have estimated that 6 to 7 million slaves were imported to the New World during the 18th century alone, depriving the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women. In the 17th and 18th centuries, black slaves worked mainly on the tobacco, rice, and indigo plantations of the southern coast. After the American Revolution, many colonists (particularly in the North, where slavery was relatively unimportant to the economy) began to link the oppression of black slaves to their own oppression by the British and to call for slavery's abolition. After the war's end, however, the new U.S. Constitution tacitly acknowledged the institution, counting each slave as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress and guaranteeing the right to repossess any "person held to service or labor". In the late 18th century, with the land used to grow tobacco nearly exhausted, the South faced an economic crisis, and the continued growth of slavery in America seemed in doubt. Around the same time, the mechanization of the textile industry in England led to a huge demand for American cotton, a southern crop whose production was unfortunately limited by the difficulty of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers by hand. In 1793, a young Yankee schoolteacher named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds. His device was widely copied, and within a few years the South would transition from the large-scale production of tobacco to that of cotton, a switch that reinforced the region's dependence on slave labor. Slavery itself was never widespread in the North, though many of the region's businessmen grew rich on the slave trade and investments in southern plantations. Between 1774 and 1804, all of the northern states abolished slavery, but the so-called "peculiar institution" remained absolutely vital to the South. Though the U.S. Congress outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, the domestic trade flourished and the slave population in the U.S. nearly tripled over the next 50 years. By 1860 it had reached nearly four million, with more than half living in the cotton-producing states of the South. Slaves in the antebellum South constituted about one-third of the southern population. Most slaves lived on large farms or small plantations; many masters owned less than 50 slaves. Slave owners sought to make their slaves completely dependent on them and a system of restrictive codes governed life among slaves. They were prohibited from learning to read and write and their behavior and movement was restricted. Many masters took sexual liberties with slave women and rewarded obedient slave behavior with favors while rebellious slaves were brutally punished. A strict hierarchy among slaves (from privileged house slaves and skilled artisans down to lowly field hands) helped keep them divided and less likely to organize against their masters. Slave marriages had no legal basis but slaves did marry and raise large families; most slave owners encouraged this practice but nonetheless did not hesitate to divide slave families by sale or removal. Slave revolts did occur within the system (notably ones led by Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in 1800 and by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822) but few were successful. The slave revolt that most terrified white slaveholders was that led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1931. Turner's group, which eventually numbered around 75 blacks, murdered some 60 whites in two days before armed resistance from local whites and the arrival of state militia forces overwhelmed them. Supporters of slavery pointed to Turner's rebellion as evidence that blacks were inherently inferior barbarians requiring an institution such as slavery to discipline them and fears of similar insurrections led many southern states to further strengthen their slave codes in order to limit the education, movement, and assembly of slaves. In the North, the increased repression of southern blacks would only fan the flames of the growing abolition movement. From the 1830s to the 1860s, a movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength in the northern United States, led by free blacks such as Frederick Douglass and white supporters such as William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the radical newspaper The Liberator, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who published the bestselling antislavery novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in 1852. While many abolitionists based their activism on the belief that slave-holding was a sin, others were more inclined to the non-religious "free-labor" argument, which held that slave-holding was regressive, inefficient, and made little economic sense.
Free blacks and other antislavery northerners had begun helping fugitive slaves escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early as the 1780s. This practice, known as the Underground Railroad, gained real momentum in the 1830s and although estimates vary widely, it may have helped anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 slaves reach freedom. The success of the Underground Railroad helped spread abolitionist feelings in the North; it also undoubtedly increased sectional tensions, convincing pro-slavery southerners of their northern countrymen's determination to defeat the institution that sustained them. America's explosive growth–and its expansion westward in the first half of the 19th century–would provide a larger stage for the growing conflict over slavery in America and its future limitation or expansion. In 1820, a bitter debate over the federal government's right to restrict slavery over Missouri's application for statehood ended in a compromise: Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, Maine as a free state, and all western territories north of Missouri's southern border were to be free soil. Although the Missouri Compromise was designed to maintain an even balance between slave and free states, it was able to help quell the forces of sectionalism only temporarily. In 1850, another tenuous compromise was negotiated to resolve the question of territory won during the Mexican War. Four years later, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict, leading pro- and anti-slavery forces to battle it out (with much bloodshed) in the new state of Kansas. Outrage in the North over the Kansas-Nebraska Act spelled the downfall of the old Whig Party and the birth of a new, all-northern Republican Party. In 1857, the Supreme Court's ruling in the Dred Scott case (involving a slave who sued for his freedom on the grounds that his master had taken him into free territory) effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise by ruling that all territories were open to slavery. The abolitionist John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 aroused sectional tensions even further. Executed for his crimes, Brown was hailed as a martyred hero by northern abolitionists and a vile murderer in the South. The South would reach the breaking point the following year, when Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected as president. Within three months, seven southern states had seceded to form the Confederate States of America; four more would follow after the Civil War began. Though Lincoln's antislavery views were well established, the central Union war aim at first was not to abolish slavery but to preserve the United States as a nation. Abolition became a war aim only later due to military necessity, growing anti-slavery sentiment in the North, and the self-emancipation of many African Americans who fled enslavement as Union troops swept through the South. Five days after the bloody Union victory at Antietam in September 1862, Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, and on January 1, 1863, he made it official that "slaves within any State, or designated part of a State…in rebellion,…shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free."
By freeing some three million black slaves in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side. Some 186,000 black soldiers would join the Union Army by the time the war ended in 1865, and 38,000 lost their lives. The total number of dead at war's end was 620,000 (out of a population of some 35 million), making it the costliest conflict in American history. The 13th Amendment, adopted late in 1865, officially abolished slavery, but freed blacks' status in the post-war South remained precarious, and significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period. Former slaves received the rights of citizenship and the equal protection of the Constitution with the passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868 and the right to vote in the 15th passed in 1870, but the provisions of Constitution were often ignored or violated and it was difficult for former slaves to gain a foothold in the post-war economy thanks to restrictive black codes and regressive contractual arrangements such as sharecropping. Despite seeing an unprecedented degree of black participation in American political life, Reconstruction was ultimately frustrating for African Americans and the rebirth of white supremacy, including the rise of racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, had triumphed in the South by 1877. Almost a century later, resistance to the lingering racism and discrimination in America that began during the slavery era would lead to the civil rights movement of the 1960s which would achieve the greatest political and social gains for blacks since Reconstruction.
