Divide Between The Northern And Southern States In The 1800's

In the mid 1800’s in the United States of America there was a great divide between the Northern and Southern states when it came to the belief in slavery. Inspired by the language of the Declaration of Independence and the colonies’ struggle for freedom from the British, many Americans in the North wanted to abolish in the United States. While the Northern states that were part of the Union seemed to be more industrialized and relied less on slave labor, so it was a foreign and deplorable practice among people who lived in the Northern States. Northerners came to resent slavery from a political and religious perspective that would fuel the Northern cynicism of Southern political power and wealth. Anti-slavery was not a united movement, there
James Henry Hammond strongly believed that black slaves were suited for all of the labor and rigors that would be told of them. He states, “a race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves.” [Present in Past, 213], which he believes is “natures law” of the survival of the fittest. One thing that James Henry Hammond states that is a positive is that slaves are, in comparison, “...between us is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment among our people, and not too much employment either.” [Present in Past, 214]. He believed the overall employment of slaves and not whites would help reduce the number of beggars in the south in comparison of white employees of the industrial North who could quite or not work if they did not want to. That in James Henry Hammond was a problem because you could not control or dictate your employees and were bounded to the laws of the United States. George Fitzhugh also believed that slavery was a positive because, it was used over the course of history. He stated, “Now it has been the practice in all countries and in
There were two perspectives from this stand point, one was that in the South slavery had become so economically involved in the U.S. that getting rid of it would upset to the economy to the point of collapse if not for its industry and the labor force it commanded. In the North slavery was thought to degrade labor, inhibited economic development, discouraged education, and engendered a domineering master class determined to rule the country in the interests of the wealthy in the South. Southerners were afraid of losing control of its states to the North and were looking to leave the union. The South was not depended on the North but the North was surely dependent on the South and the economic fruit that it provided the country as a whole. There were religious, political, and moral conflicts that were justified from both perspectives, while the North was looking to Unite the country, the south was looking to protect the state’s rights that they believe was being threatened by the federal government with the polices that they had in place with Western expansion and class tensions because of what John Calhoun stated in his speech before congress, “destroy it [slavery] would be to destroy us as a people. But let me not be understood as admitting, even by implication, that the existing relations between the two races in the slaveholding states is an evil: far