US Civil War — slavery and long-term causes

Answer

The forced movement of roughly one million enslaved people from the Upper South to the new Cotton Belt states after the cotton gin made cotton hugely profitable.

Answer

It made short-staple cotton fast to process and highly profitable, driving planters to expand cotton farming — and slavery — westward.

Answer

Gang system: enslaved people worked in groups under constant overseer supervision (common on cotton plantations). Task system: each person had a daily quota to complete (common in rice cultivation).

Answer

Gabriel's Rebellion (1800, VA) — betrayed before it began. Denmark Vesey's plot (1822, SC) — discovered and suppressed. Nat Turner's Rebellion (1831, VA) — ~55 white deaths, revolt crushed, ~200 Black people killed in reprisals.

Answer

A secret network of safe houses and routes that helped enslaved people escape to freedom in the North or Canada; Harriet Tubman was its most famous guide.

Answer

Launched *The Liberator*, a newspaper demanding immediate, uncompensated emancipation, helping build the organised abolitionist movement.

Answer

John C. Calhoun argued slavery was not a necessary evil but a positive good that supposedly civilised and cared for enslaved people — a defensive, self-serving pro-slavery claim that hardened Southern politics.

Answer

The Tariff of 1828 ('Tariff of Abominations') raised costs for the agricultural South while protecting Northern industry; South Carolina declared it null and void within the state.

Answer

Jackson secured the Force Bill (1833) to enforce the tariff by force if needed; Henry Clay's Compromise Tariff of 1833 lowered rates, and South Carolina backed down.

Answer

It was a rehearsal for 1861: it proved a state would threaten secession over federal policy and gave the South a states'-rights argument it reused to defend slavery.

Answer

The growing sense that the North and South had become two separate societies with conflicting economic, cultural and social interests rather than one unified nation.

Answer

Economic: North industrialised with free wage labour; South stayed agricultural, dependent on enslaved labour and cotton exports. Cultural: North built identity around reform and free labour; South around a slaveholding planter hierarchy.