Captivating History - The Battle of Chancellorsville: A Captivating Guide to an Important Battle of the American Civil War

Let's be clearthe American Civil War was fought over slavery. Some may argue that the conflict was fought over states rights, and there can be a logical point made for that. However, the one right the South was fighting to keep the most was slavery.

Since its inception, the United States had been wrestling with itself over the issue of slavery. How could a nation founded on the principle that states All men are created equal allow the enslavement of others? People today still wrestle with that. They needn't do so. For most white people in the South and a good many in the North, Africans (the polite name that many in the community were referred to as) were not people .

By the beginning of the Civil War, Africans had been in bondage in North America for about two and a half centuries. They were captured or bought (from other Africans or Arab slave traders) in Africa and then brought to the Western Hemisphere. They were also bred into slavery. Children and their parents were torn from each other, just like chattel animals. With the ratification of the US Constitution in 1787, slaves were labeled as three-fifths of a person for tax, census, and political reasons.

In the years between the establishment of the United States and the start of the Civil War in 1861, the government and the people of America wrestled with the question of slavery. By 1852, with the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, many in the North were pushing for the abolition of slavery in the entire country or, at the very least, the prevention of new slave states being established.

In the South, where the economy was based on agriculture, the sentiments to limit or eliminate their virtually cost-free source of labor didn't fall on deaf earsin fact, it enraged the people. The North, which was much more populous than the South, was also far richer and was seen by many (especially by the ruling classes in the southern part of the country) as pushy and power-hungry. To them, it seemed as if the men in the North were trying to gain more power by eventually freeing the slaves. The liberated black Americans would naturally side with the Northerners politically, and the Southern way of life, which was seen, at least by those on top, as genteel and aristocratic, would be made extinct.

A war was fought in the 1850s in Kansas and Missouri, two territories vying for statehood, and this war became a literal battleground for the question over the expansion of slavery. By the end of 1860, virtually everyone in the United States believed that a civil war was inevitable, and on December 20 th of that year, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union.

It's also interesting to note (and some Southern apologists use this for their states rights argument) that a number of states in which slavery was legal remained in the Union. These were Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri (though the latter two had a significant number of men fighting for the South).