The gravest and greatest of these steps was, of course, the elimination of slavery. The majority of Americans resisted slavery: the first slaves were imported into Brazil and other South American regions in 1510, but North America was able to hold out against slavery for more than another century.
Prior to the establishment of the United States as an independent and sovereign nation, the majority of the residents in the majority of the thirteen colonies opposed slavery. Led by Roger Wiliams, Rhode Island made slavery illegal in 1652. Samuel Sewall published abolitionist writings in Massachusetts as early as 1700.
In all thirteen colonies, energetic abolitionist movements were at work prior to 1776.
Once the nation was established as independent from Britain, is was clear that the “Founders wanted to abolish slavery,” as Ben Shapiro writes:
From its founding, the United States attempted to come to grips with slavery and phase it out. The state of Vermont was the first sovereign state to abolish slavery, in 1777.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that King George III “waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither.” Rebellion against England’s king was a step toward ending slavery.
Although slavery vanished from most of the original thirteen states, and from those later added to the union, it stubbornly resisted American efforts to eradicate it from some of the states, particularly those which had integrated it into agricultural economies of tobacco, cotton, and sugar cane.
Continuing the struggle against slavery, the U.S. Constitution was written in 1787, including the famous and controversial “three-fifths clause.” This phrase was introduced as an anti-slavery tactic: It both created a congnitive dissonance by its disconcerting logic, and denied power to a bloc of pro-slavery states. Ben Shapiro explains:
The Constitution of the United States is frequently seen as enshrining slavery, but the so-called three-fifths clause was an attempt to do the opposite. The whole question of popular apportionment rested on whether to count slaves as full people for purposes of representation. To do so would have put the slaveholding south at a significant advantage: they would have counted slaves in their population, not allowed them to vote, then used their increased representation in order to re-enshrine slavery. As James Madison noted, the delegates from South Carolina fought for blacks to be counted as whole people so as to include them “in the rule of representation, equally with the Whites.” The three-fifths compromise was designed to curb the South’s expansionist tendencies with regard to slavery by preventing them from stacking the electoral deck. The Constitution also allowed slave importation to continue until 1808 — but Congress moved in 1807 to end it there.
By 1807, then, the U.S. was ahead of schedule in its efforts to end slavery. A small but entrenched group of leaders continued to support slavery.
The final end of slavery was possible because the nation’s economy was based, not on slavery, but on free enterprise. Not only was the industrial part of the country not dependent on slavery, but rather it actively opposed slavery.
Yet abolitionism was not confined to any one part of the United States. Before and during the war, significant abolitionist movements existed in all states. The South was not a united monolithic pro-slavery bloc.
For at least these two reasons, then, a massive amount of energy was poured into the war to end slavery: because the larger part of the economy did not rely on slavery, and because the larger part of society was opposed to slavery:
The United States fought a great and massive Civil War to free the slaves, in which over 620,000 Americans died, nearly half the total number of Americans to die in all wars combined. The economy of the United States was not built on slavery — in fact, the South’s economic power was dismal compared to that of the north, which is why the north was able to overcome the south during the Civil War.
Between 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and 1865, when the Civil War ended, America achieved its goal of ending slavery.
In South America, Brazil kept slavery long after the United States had ended it. Slavery was not abolished Brazil until 1888. Likewise, Cuba maintained slavery until 1886.
The movement to abolish slavery in the United States was part of a larger trend to expand freedom for all people. As soon as the Civil War was over, and slavery was gone, this movement went on to obtain another great goal. The abolitionist movement gave birth to the suffrage movement, with the goal of women voting. The same political party, the part of Lincoln, energized both movements. By 1869 — not 1920 as sometimes reported — women in the United States began voting regularly.
Throughout American history, the nation has worked to increase liberty, expanding suffrage to larger and larger segments of society, creating more economic opportunities, and allowing more and varied forms of expression.
The common thread which connects the points of U.S. history from the 1600s to the present is the persistent drive to expand freedom.
