How did African slavery arrive at a point where it led to the bloodiest war in American history?Ī part of America since early colonial days, African slavery by the nineteenth century was increasingly controversial and largely concentrated in the agricultural-driven southern states. Paradoxically, the creation of the South upon the practice of African slavery ensured the destruction of the region.
Baptists and other white Americans North and South during the Civil War-era were unequivocal: secession, the existence of the Confederate States of America, and the Civil War were all the result of slavery, the immoral (or moral, depending on one’s race, political persuasion and/or geographic location) institution that served as the economic engine of the South.Īs one historian summarized, “ slave labor was the foundation of a prosperous economic system in the South.” Yet that Southern “economic system” truly benefited only a small percentage of elite white southerners–plantation owners–as Bruce Levine’s The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South so aptly documents.
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