9781422285947

The Civil War Begins

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authors tried to skirt the issue of slavery. They recognized that slavery could potentially divide the Northern and Southern states—something they wished to avoid. However, one thing they could not avoid was the matter of representation in Congress’s House of Representatives, which was determined by population. Southern states wanted slaves counted as part of their populations; Northern states argued that since the slaves did not have the rights of citizens, they should not be included in the population count. In the end, the delegates agreed that each African- American slave would count as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of the census. This compromise, and others, preserved peace between the Northern and Southern states for many years. In 1818, when the Missouri Territory asked to be considered for state- hood, some Northern leaders wanted slavery to be illegal there. At the time there were an equal number of slave and nonslave states, and political

leaders did not want to upset the balance between them. The con- troversy was settled when Maine broke away fromMassachusetts and was admitted to the Union as a free state at the same time that Missouri entered the Union as a slave state. It was then proposed that no more slave states would be created from territories north of Missouri’s southern border. Congress passed this proposal, which came to be known as the Missouri Compromise. Along with the practice of admitting states in pairs—one slave, one

Slaves pick cotton on a Southern plantation, 1850s. On the eve of the Civil War, nearly 4 million Afri- can Americans were held in slavery in the 15 states where the institution was permitted. Their labor fueled the South’s economy, which was based on farming.