Shiloh, 1862 Read Online Free Page A

640,000 brought over before importation of slaves was officially ended in 1808. But the trade had spread throughout the Caribbean Basin, and in America to all the colonies, which became the states. Before the turn of the century slavery in the United States had appeared to be dying out of its own accord as “inefficient, wasteful, and increasingly morally repugnant.”
    Then Whitney invented his gin and slavery was back in vogue in the South. Raising cotton was a highly labor-intensive business, with immense profits, and slaves seemed to be the only answer, even though the institution remained just as “morally repugnant” as before.
    By the eve of the Civil War cotton accounted for two-thirds of America’s exports and in time cotton and slavery became almost inextricably bound together with every facet of Southern life. The larger plantations were like small cities, with their own gardeners, blacksmiths, carpenters, bricklayers, horse handlers, and, of course, field hands. Architects made their living designing mansions and offices for cotton agents (called “factors”). Steamboat companies hauled cotton from the landings and to the plantersdelivered European furniture, fine carpets, china, and so on. Engineers and draftsmen thrived by surveying cotton land. Southern lawyers represented the cotton interests and Southern doctors tended their ailments. Bankers, gin operators, railroad companies, warehouse owners, hoteliers, hardware salesmen, longshoremen, farriers, druggists, houses of worship, and houses of prostitution—all of these, and more, were in one way or another interdependent on the cotton trade. Even the myriad small “subsistence farmers,” who owned no slaves, tried to put in a few acres of the crop to earn a little cash.
    Thus the South viewed it with alarm when, in the 1820s, Northern abolition parties first made themselves known. Initially the abolitionists had declared slavery to be a social evil and lobbied to ship freed slaves back to Liberia, on the west coast of Africa. They would later change this tactic, but first, in 1828, during the presidency of John Quincy Adams—and against the strenuous objections of its Southern members—Congress passed a revenue tariff that caused the prices of goods that southerners typically purchased to soar by 50 percent.
    It was quickly dubbed the “tariff of abominations” by enraged southerners, and in South Carolina the notion of secession first reared its head when the legislature passed a law asserting that no state was bound to enforce a federal law that it found obnoxious. This produced the so-called Nullification Crisis, which pitted the power of an individual state against the power of the federal government, and
Marbury
v.
Madison
be damned. 1
    Outright rebellion was diffused after President Andrew Jackson inherited the controversy and threatened to enforce the law, with military action if necessary, but it left a bitter taste in the minds of most southerners, who saw the legislation as a slap in the face against the South. 2 At times, Southern historians have tried to argue that the tariff was the root cause of the Civil War, but that is untrue. It is fair to say, however, that it was a critical ingredient in the onset of Southern mistrust of the North and also seemed to have created a mazy kind of dividing line in which the South began to think of itself as a separate entity with the right to withdraw, or secede, from the Union if given just cause.
    The tariff, which had become abominable for everybody, thus set the stage for the states’ rights dispute, which pitted states’ laws against the notion of federal sovereignty, an argument that continued into the next century, and the next. States’ rights political parties sprang up across the South during the 1830s. A noteworthy example of just how crucial the issue had become was embodied in the decision in 1831 by Mr. and Mrs. Nathaniel Gist (ironically from Union, South Carolina) to name their