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The North and the South was one of several examples of the pro-slavery plantation literature genre that emerged from the Southern United States in response to Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, which was criticised in the South as inaccurately depicting the workings of slavery and the attitudes of plantation owners towards their slaves.
Slavery was defended in the South as a "positive good", and the largest religious denominations split over the slavery issue into regional organizations of the North and South. By 1850, the newly rich, cotton-growing South threatened to secede from the Union. Bloody fighting broke out over slavery in the Kansas Territory.
Thus, at mid-19th century, the free-versus-slave status of the new territories was a critical issue, both for the North, where anti-slavery sentiment had grown, and for the South, where the fear of slavery's abolition had grown.
States' rights advocates also cited the Fugitive Slave Clause to demand federal jurisdiction over slaves who escaped into the North. Anti-slavery forces took opposite stances on these issues. The Fugitive Slave Clause in the Constitution was the result of compromises between North and South when the Constitution was written.
The three-fifths clause was a compromise between those (in the North) who wanted no slaves counted, and those (in the South) who wanted all the slaves counted. The Constitution (Article IV, section 4) also allowed the federal government to suppress domestic violence, a provision that could be used against slave revolts.
Calhoun sought to defend slavery as a positive good, and expanded his argument to condemn the North and industrial capitalism, asserting that slavery was "actually superior to the 'wage slavery' of the North". [26] He believed that free laborers in the North were just as enslaved as the Negro workers in the South.
A Hard Fight for We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Silkenat, David. Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Snyder, Terri L. The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North America ...
Though slaves were present in other states, most were forced to work in agriculture in the South. According to H. W. Brands, because of the declining productivity of crops like tobacco due to soil exhaustion, many of the drafters of the Constitution assumed that slavery would die out naturally in the South as it had done in industrialized North.