Slavery, the Underground Railroad, and the Civil War
“Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.” -Abraham Lincoln
When rebel cannons roared, attacking a Federal fort in Charleston harbor, our country was changed forever. The act sparked a torrent of bloodshed which touched tens of millions of people all around what was- up until then- the United States. Nothing before or since has come close to matching the intensity of this war which altered the very nature of America. The roots of the conflict ran deep in the South- where the practice of slavery was widespread. The sale and enslavement of human beings had unfortunately existed for millennia around the world. Powerful business interests kept it going. It wasn’t just white people who put African-Americans into bondage. Some blacks captured others of their own race and sold them into slavery in Africa, where willing buyers participated in this abominable practice. The South’s economy was agrarian and labor-intensive, making large work forces necessary to do low-skilled tasks. Interestingly, just over 25% of people in the South owned slaves- so the other 75% would later be asked to put their lives on the line defending it. By the 1800s, the practice was ingrained in southern society. The Missouri Compromise in 1820 essentially outlawed slavery in the western territories. Later the Compromise of 1850 was reached to settle the issue, but it did not.
Senator Stephen Douglas proposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which in 1854 allowed those states to decide the issue by ‘popular sovereignty’, negating earlier legislation. The Republican Party was born in protest. Notable in their platform was an opposition to slavery. A young lawyer from Illinois felt so strongly about the issue, he decided to run for the U.S. Senate against a well-known opponent. Abraham Lincoln – standing 6 foot 4” tall- and Stephen Douglas – measuring a foot shorter went at it in a series of debates in 1858. Lincoln said, “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.” Douglas won the election, but Lincoln won the hearts and minds of millions with his eloquent speeches.
Slavery and the Underground Railroad
More than any other issue, the Civil War was fought to decide whether “the peculiar institution” would continue to be the law of the land. Quakers, known as “The Society of Friends” were the first organized group in America to openly criticize slavery. Decades before in 1688, Quakers from Germantown, Pennsylvania had condemned the practice, sparking an active debate all around the country. Their criticism was a starting point for what became the abolitionist movement. Surprisingly, some Quakers owned slaves. In 1776, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Quakers instructed all chapters to disown anyone who refused to free their slaves. Several conduits existed for slaves to escape from the southern states into the North as far as Canada. The Eastern Corridor ran from South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia into Maryland, leading to southeastern Pennsylvania and Delaware.
Men and women grasping their children as they hide behind trees, hoping no one will see them in the moonlight. Young ones running terrified as they wonder where they are going, dragged through corn fields, into the shadows of buildings. Cautious “station masters” opening their homes to total strangers who might be the cause of their arrest by local authorities. These are the images of the Underground Railroad, an informal network of homes, farms and churches where slaves hoped to start a new life.
The origin of the term Underground Railroad has never been definitively established. Author William Kashatus in his book, “Just Over the Line: Chester County and the Underground Railroad,” describes one legend. Two slave-owners lost track of their fugitive as they pursued him through Kentucky to the edge of the Ohio River. Bewildered, one of them supposedly said: “There must be an underground railroad here somewhere!” The Underground Railroad never published a train schedule. Its routes were well kept secrets, clandestine pathways around the nation.
As a free state, Pennsylvania became a haven for slaves crossing the Mason-Dixon Line. In the mid-1800s, Chester County had thousands of Quakers, most of whom were strongly against the practice. For many, the “final straw” was the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which brought the force of the Federal government upon individuals who aided in the transport of slaves away from their owners.
Violent conflicts over slavery had raged all across the nation, with abolitionists like John Brown taking the law into their own hands, often attacking and killing slaveowners. The term “bleeding Kansas” was coined to describe the mayhem spreading around that region. By 1860, the nation was at a breaking point. The Republicans largely sided with those opposed to the spread of the horrific practice. Abraham Lincoln was drafted to carry the banner. Most Democrats in the South and around the country either supported or were tolerant of slavery; Republicans generally hated it. The nation was polarized. On November 6th, 1860 Lincoln was elected President without a true ‘mandate’- only 40% of the vote. Less than six weeks later, South Carolina seceded from the Union. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas followed suit. On February 9, 1861, the Confederate States of America came to life. America was fractured.
Over four long years, the nation saw bloodshed it could never have imagined. The country was literally being torn apart- brothers fighting brothers, fathers fighting sons as they took up arms on opposite sides of the conflict. Despite having vastly superior resources and a much larger population to draw upon for its military, the Union came perilously close to losing this war. Confederate General Robert E. Lee deftly used his limited army to wreak havoc upon northern regiments. At the Battles of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and around the South, he and other rebel commanders defeated Union forces. If not for the dramatic Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863, followed by General Sherman’s dramatic surge through the southeastern states destroying their infrastructure, the blow to the Union might have been fatal. Yet Providence smiled upon us. By the grace of God, we survived.
Lincoln saved the Union, ended slavery and guided the country through its most treacherous years since the founding of the Republic. That is why he is considered one of our greatest Presidents. The toll of war was tremendous. Roughly 600,000 people or 2% of the population- died in the Civil War. Today’s equivalent would have more than 6,000,000 people perish- an unthinkable tragedy.
There were many heroes in this conflict, most of them soldiers, but also brave citizens who stepped up and defended what they knew to be right. Amazingly, many black men risked their lives- to fight for a nation which did not even recognize them as citizens. Approximately 180,000 black men served in the Union Army- roughly ten per cent of all Union troops, still more in the Navy. Their efforts helped save our republic.
Monuments to the Civil War are all around the country, notably in the mid-Atlantic area. The Soldiers and Sailors Monument is prominent in downtown Philadelphia. The Colored Soldiers Monument in Logan Square honors the many blacks who served. Reportedly the youngest soldier to die in the war was drummer boy Charles King; his gravestone is in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Four men who fought – Generals Meade, McClellan, Hancock and Reynolds – were all from Pennsylvania. Historians now recognize that Pennsylvania was critical in winning the war.
Lincoln once said, in effect, that America would never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. The Civil War has been debated by historians and scholars for more than 150 years. It remains an enigma. The repercussions of slavery still resound today. How could a country enormously blessed with talent and natural resources nearly destroy itself? Perhaps that was the test we as a nation needed to pass. America had to go through the crucible of war to emerge stronger, more resilient, tempered in a forge of calamity, a society ready to learn from its mistakes, true to the promise that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the Earth.”
