The first blacks were brought to Virginia in 1619, just 12 years after the founding of Jamestown. Initially, many were regarded as indentured servants who could earn their freedom. By the 1660s, however, as the demand for plantation labor in the Southern colonies grew, the institution of slavery began to harden around them, and Africans were brought to America in shackles for a lifetime of involuntary servitude.

By the late 17^th century, Virginia’s and Maryland’s  economic  and social structure rested on the great planters and the yeomen farmers. The  planters of the tidewater region, supported by slave labor, held most of the political power and the best land. They built great houses, adopted an aristocratic way of life and kept in touch with the world of culture overseas.

                Unlike other economic  issues, slavery was also a moral problem. In the early days of the Republic it had appeared that slavery might die out. In 1786 George Washington wrote that he wished some plan might be adopted "by which slavery may be abolished by slow, sure and imperceptible degrees.” Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, all Virginians, and other leading Southern statesmen, made similar statements. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had banned  slavery in the Northwest Territory.  As late as 1808, when the international slave trade was abolished, there were many Southerners who thought that slavery would soon end.  But then a single invention suddenly changed the picture.

In 1793 Eli Whitney invented cotton gin (engine) – a machine that made it possible for one person to clean 50 pounds of cotton a day. Whitney’s  invention  suddenly  made the production of short-staple cotton highly profitable. Plantations would prosper if only they could find enough workers to grow and "gin” the cotton. Black slaves seemed the obvious labor supply and slavery began to seem necessary for southern prosperity. At the same time planters wanting more cotton moved rapidly westward. By  1818 some 60,000 settlers had crossed the Mississippi and were pushing  up the valley of the Missouri River. They had brought 10,000 slaves with them.

Sugarcane, another labor-intensive crop, also contributed to slavery ‘s  extension in the South. The rich, hot lands of southeastern Louisiana proved ideal for growing  sugarcane profitably. By 1830 the state was supplying the nation with about half its sugar. Finally, Tobacco growers moved westward, taking slavery  with them.

 Missouri’s  request  for admission to the Union as a slave state opened up a heated argument over the expansion of slavery. It would destroy the balance between free and slave states and give more power to the latter in the Senate: when Missouri applied for admission, there were 11 free and 11 slave states in the country.

In 1820 Congress passed the Missouri Compromise. Missouri was added as a slave state, while Maine came in as a free state. Industrializing Northeast and agricultural South added one new state to their teams. At the same time the law drew a line from the western border of Missouri through all the lands of the Louisiana Purchase, excluding  slavery  "forever from north of the parallel of 36 30’ except for the state of Missouri itself”.

Although people at the time called it a compromise, both sides were, in fact, given some time before the open fight.

Between 1841 and 1866 some 350,000 Americans made a long and dangerous journey to the West. Most took a 200-mile path known as the Overland Trail: first to the Rocky Mountains, then either to Oregon or to California. Expansion was supposed to bring unity to Americans, but it raised many problems concerning slavery.

In 1848 the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill (California) set off a mad dash of settlers who hoped to strike it rich. Within a year the population of California increased from 14,000 to almost 100,000. When California tried to become a state a great question whether slavery  should be allowed there arose.  The problem threatened to tear the nation apart. Southern leaders said they would fight for their rights. If they lost the debate over California, they warned they might secede from the USA and become an independent country.

Then an influential Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky came up with ideas to settle the quarrel. On February 5, 1850, he suggested the following plan: 1) California should be admitted to the Union as a free state; 2) Utah, Nevada and other territories, obtained in the Mexican Cession, should decide the problem of slavery themselves; 3) Northerners should help Southern slave owners catch their runaway slaves; 4) slave trade in Washington D.C. should be stopped, but slave ownership in the district would not be affected. People quarreled over Clay’s compromise for months. Finally, in September 1850, Congress voted the plan into law. The part concerning  runaway slaves ,was called the Fugitive Slave Act. The entire plan became known as the Compromise of 1850.

In 1851 Harriet Beecher Stowe from Maine wrote a book that had a powerful effect. The title was "Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. It was a story of a slave murdered by his master. More than 300,000 copies of the book were sold in its first year and it was reprinted again and again.

For the first time many Northerners saw the terrible results of Southern slavery. Those who had had no opinion, disapproved it now. Southerners also became angry when they read  "Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. They thought the story gave the wrong picture of slavery.

The book aggravated tensions between the North and the South, the regions that were different in many ways. Most of the South’s wealth came from farming. Cotton and other crops were raised on large farms and plantations. Plantation owners depended on cheap slave labor. They strongly believed that black slaves and "King Cotton” were part of the Southern way of life.

On the other hand, major changes were taking place in the North. Gradually, more of its wealth was coming from industry. Manufacturing and business were becoming the Northern way of life. This way depended on free labor, not slavery.

Those being against  slavery, formed the abolitionist movement. Among the most famous abolitionists was William Lloyd Garrison from Boston. He published an antislavery newspaper "The Liberator”. Some former slaves became leaders in the abolitionist movement. Frederick Douglass published the newspaper "The North Star”, spoke against slavery in many parts of the North and was an active participant of the Underground Railroad. Another famous runaway, Harriet Tubman, risked death to help hundreds of other slaves escape from the South.

In 1854, Congress reopened the slavery issue in western lands. The Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed settlers choose for themselves whether or not to have slavery. Fighting broke out in Kansas between those who favored slave ownership and those who opposed it. The conflict became known as Bleeding Kansas.

The possible spread of slavery into Kansas outraged abolitionists. It also angered a group of Northerners called free-soilers. They opposed slave ownership, but did not demand that it be abolished in the South. They wanted to keep slavery from spreading to new territories. Now the struggle in Kansas united abolitionists and free-soilers against the South. In the mid-1850s they formed the new Republican party. Its major goal was to keep slavery from spreading into western territories.

In 1857 the US Supreme Court tried to put one question regarding slavery to rest. Dred and Harriet Scott were slaves who believed that they had a legal right to freedom. The Court - dominated by Southerners -  decided against them. The decision ran that no black, either free or slave, could claim the rights of US citizenship. It was also declared that Congress could not keep slavery out. Slaves were property just like horses or clothes. Congress could not pass laws that would take away a Northerner’s right to own horses. Neither could they take away a Southerner’s right to own slaves.

The Court’s decision thus invalidated the whole set of compromise measures by which Congress for a generation had tried to settle the slavery issue.  It stirred fierce resentment throughout the North. Never before had the Court been so bitterly condemned. For Southern Democrats, the decision was a great victory, since it gave judicial sanction to their justification of slavery throughout the territories.

In 1859 a white Northerner named John Brown, who had captured and killed five proslavery settlers in Kansas three years before, led an anti slavery revolt in Virginia. His men attacked a military arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, but people did not support him. John Brown was arrested by Colonel Robert E. Lee and hanged in Charlestown on December 2, 1859. Many Northerners hailed Brown as a hero, while Southerners feared that most of the North was against them now.

In 1860 the Republican candidate for president was Abraham Lincoln. He was known in the country for his antislavery attitude. Southerners were convinced that Lincoln would threaten their way of life. He did not win a single Southern state, but he swept the North and was elected president.

Angry Southerners decided that they had had enough. On December 24, 1860, a few weeks after the election of Abraham Lincoln, South Carolina declared its independence from the Union. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas followed it. They formed the Confederate States of America.

In his inaugural address Lincoln said that no state had the right to secede from the union. But he also made a promise to Southern states that "the government will not assail you, unless you assail it”. Unfortunately, it was too late. In a few weeks the first shots of the Civil War, the most terrible war in the US history, would ring out at Fort Sumter, South Carolina.