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The American Civil War did not merely exist in isolation on the North American continent, the impact that slavery had during the war on the foreign relations of the United States of America was still significant, despite being a domestic war and slavery being a domestic issue, it had international consequences.
Punishment and killing of slaves: Slave codes regulated how slaves could be punished, usually going so far as to apply no penalty for accidentally killing a slave while punishing them. [9] Later laws began to apply restrictions on this, but slave-owners were still rarely punished for killing their slaves. [ 10 ]
A metal collar could be put on a slave. Such collars were thick and heavy; they often had protruding spikes that impeded work as well as rest. Louis Cain, a survivor of slavery, described the punishment of a fellow slave: "One nigger run to the woods to be a jungle nigger, but massa cotched him with the dog and took a hot iron and brands him.
The Civil War, which lasted four years, directly threatened the very existence of slavery and, in turn, slave patrols. The first year after the Civil War began, slave patrols increased. Confederates were expecting slave revolts, which inspired them to appoint more patrols.
Characterizing it as the "central event" in the life of a slave between the American Revolution and the Civil War, Berlin wrote that, whether slaves were directly uprooted or lived in fear that they or their families would be involuntarily moved, "the massive deportation traumatized black people, both slave and free". [175]
Torture of slaves in the United States was fairly common, as part of what many slavers claimed was necessary discipline. As one history put it, "Stinted allowance, imprisonment, and whipping were the usual methods of punishment; incorrigibles were sometimes 'ironed' or sold." [1]
Contrabands, who were fugitive slaves, including cooks, laundresses, laborers, teamsters, railroad repair crews, fled to the Union Army, but were not legally freed until the Emancipation Proclamation, which Lincoln signed on January 1, 1863, more than two years before the end of the Civil War.
Slavery was a divisive issue in the United States. It was a major issue during the writing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, the subject of political crises in the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850 and was the primary cause of the American Civil War in 1861. Just before the Civil War, there were 19 free states and 15 slave ...