It is fair to say that the nation is as divided today as it was in the decades leading up to the Civil War that came about by the decision to secede and thereby destroy the Union. The seeds of that decision were planted in the Constitution because of the compromises that were needed to secure its ratification by the states.
The Founders, many of whom were slave owners at a time when slave labor was necessary to the economy of the south and existed in the north as well, In his new book, “A Disease In the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War”, historian Thomas Fleming provides a context of the nation’s earliest years, noting that “Long before the first slaves arrived in the English colony of Virginia in 1619, slavery was a thriving institution in the New World…Few people criticized or objected to slavery; it was one of the world’s oldest social institutions with roots in ancient Babylon, Greece and Rome.”
It is an irony of U.S. history that the Revolution “had ended in the creation of a slave-owning republic devoted to freedom, liberty, and equality.” A contradiction to be sure.
At the heart of cause of the Civil War was the growing fear among white southerners who were vastly outnumbered by the slave population on whom their economy depended. Events like the Nat Turner slave insurrection and the slaughter of whites in Haiti fanned these fears. This was an era before mechanization eliminated the need for slave labor, but ironically it was the invention of the cotton gin that separated seeds from fiber that led to the rise of “King Cotton” and the wealth it produced. As Fleming notes, “Congress was aware that Americans north and south had been involved with slavery for over a century, and had profited immensely from it.”