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Harriet Tubman is one of the many who helped slaves escaped through the Underground Railroad. She was called the 'Moses of Her People'.

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States' Rights is the term to describe the struggle of political power in the United States.

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Facts, information and articles about States Rights, one of the causes of the civil war

States' Rights summary: States' rights is a term used to describe the ongoing struggle over political power in the United States between the federal government and individual states as broadly outlined in the Tenth Amendment and whether the USA is a single entity or an amalgamation of independent nations. In modern times the term States Rights has also come to symbolize the opposition of some states to federal mandated laws against racial segregation and discrimination.

States' Rights in the Colonies

When the original 13 independent colonies announced their independence from Great Britain in 1776 they regarded themselves as sovereign (independent) states. The demands of the Revolutionary War forced the states to recognize a need for a central government. The Continental Congress established Articles of Confederation, an agreement that created a weak central government. In the years following the Revolutionary War, individual states created their own laws, attempted to make foreign treaties on their own, etc. Europe saw the young United States as weak. The polyglot of laws, danger from Europe and the national government's ineffectual response to Shay's Rebellion in Massachusetts convinced many Americans that a "more perfect union" was needed. The United States Constitution, which the country has operated under since 1789, strengthened the central government in many ways, including taxation, the ability to call up state militias for national service, etc. It also established certain individual rights throughout the nation, including freedoms of speech, assembly, religion, etc. The Ninth Amendment stated, "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people," and the Tenth Amendment says, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." These two amendments assured the states of continued autonomy in handling most of their internal affairs.

Slavery and Tariffs

Disputes arose at times. During the War of 1812 New England states met to discuss seceding from the Union because the war was interfering with their trade with Britain. In 1832 national tariffs that benefited Northern manufacturers while hurting the economy of Southern states led to the Nullification Crisis, in which South Carolina declared the tariffs null and void. The state threatened to leave the Union, but a compromise was reached that temporarily defused the crisis.

What brought the question of states' rights to the fore was changing attitudes toward slavery. Northern abolitionists began vehemently assailing the institution and the states that continued to practice it, nearly all of them below the Mason-Dixon Line. Some Northerners aided the escape of runaway slaves (a violation of the Constitution's provisiions that made a fugitive from one state a fugitive in every state) and mobs sometimes assaulted slave owners and slave hunters seeking runaways. (Slavery originally existed in all states, and the writers of the Constitution avoided addressing the matter of perpetuating or ending slavery in order to obtain ratification from all states.) When victory in the Mexican War (1846-48) resulted in the US expanding its territory all the way to the Pacific Ocean, the question of whether or not to permit slavery in the new territories. The debate over slavery intensified, creating a widening gap between slaveholding and nonslaveholding states. When a "purely regional party," the new Republican Party swept the 1859 elections in the North and the party's candidate Abraham Lincoln, an avowed foe of the expansion of slavery, Southern states seceded from the Union. See Causes of the Civil War on HistoryNet.

After the Civil War

It has been said that before the Civil War the country was referred to as "The United States are ... " but after the war the description became "The United States is ... " Yet questions of federal vs. state power continued to crop up. Virginia sued to reclaim certain of its western counties that had become part of the breakaway state of West Virginia during the war but was rebuffed by the Supreme Court, and Reconstruction raised many federal vs. states questions.

In the 1925 Gitlow vs. New York decision, the Court held that the Bill of Rights applies to the states as well as to the federal government, in keeping with the 14th Amendment. In 1948, a group of Southern delegates walked out of the Democratic National Convention and formed the States Rights Party (nicknamed the Dixiecrats). The reason for the party split was that the traditionally conservative Democratic Party was becoming more liberal and had embraced a platform for the coming election that called for federal anti-lynching legislation, abolishing poll taxes in federal elections (which had been used to keep African Americans from voting), desegregation of America's military services, and creation of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee to prevent racial discrimination. The States Rights Party, with South Carolina's senator Strom Thurmond as its presidential candidate and Mississippi governor Fielding L. Wright as his vice-president. They received 1.2 million votes and 39 electoral delegates, nowhere near enough to carry the election, but "States' Rights" became the rallying cry for opposition to federally mandated desegregation and anti-discrimination policies in the following decades. The landmark Supreme Court decision in 1952's Brown vs. Board of Education that found racially "separate but equal" policies unconstitutionally denied black children the same educational opportunities as white children, leading to widespread anti-desegregation States' Rights demonstrations in conservative states.

In recent years States' Rights philosophies have been adopted by many who oppose the growth of the federal government and its recognition of social changes such as legalized abortion. The Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare, has generated intense debates over the ability of the federal government to force states to adopt a nationwide healthcare law.

Articles About States' Rights Civil War From History Net Magazines

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Facts, information and articles about States Rights, one of the causes of the civil war States' Rights summary: States' rights is a term used to describe the ongoing struggle over political power in the United States between the federal government and individual states as broadly outlined in the Tenth Amendment and whether the USA is [...]

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Fort Sumter was a fort in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. Fort Sumter is considered the first shot fired for the American Civil War.

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Sound Smart: Fort Sumter and the Civil War | History

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Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, but his main goal in office was to keep the Union States free and stop the spreading of slave states.

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America the Story of Us: Lincoln | History

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The Missouri Compromise was a compromise on a balance of power and in turn did nothing to abolish slavery in slave states.

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What Was the Missouri Compromise? | History

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Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin

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Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin

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Uncle Tom's Cabin was written by abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe. The novel shows the reality of how slaves were treated and is considered a cause of the Civil War.

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harriet beecher stowe — uncle tom's cabin

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Harriet Beecher Stowe - Uncle Tom's Cabin [ushistory.org]

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Harriet Beecher Stowe's - Uncle_Tom's_Cabin_ was perhaps the most influential novel in history. Its stark depictions of the horrors of slavery inflamed the sentiments of abolitionists, both in the U.S. and abroad.

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In the late evening of October 16 and the early morning of October 17 in 1859, John Brown led a raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia.

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On the evening of October 16, 1859 John Brown, a staunch abolitionist, and a group of his supporters left their farmhouse hide-out en route to Harpers Ferry. Descending upon the town in the early hours of October 17th, Brown and his men captured prominent citizens and seized the federal armory and arsenal.

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John Brown was the abolitionist who led the raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia.

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The Underground Railroad was a system run by African Americans to remove slaves from their slave owners to the free North. The most famous person connected to the Underground Railroad was Harriet Tubman.

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The Underground Railroad, a vast network of people who helped fugitive slaves escape to the North and to Canada, was not run by any single organization or person. Rather, it consisted of many individuals -- many whites but predominently black -- who knew only of the local efforts to aid fugitives and not of the overall operation. Still, it effectively moved hundreds of slaves northward each year -- according to one estimate, the South lost 100,000 slaves between 1810 and 1850.

An organized system to assist runaway slaves seems to have begun towards the end of the 18th century. In 1786 George Washington complained about how one of his runaway slaves was helped by a "society of Quakers, formed for such purposes." The system grew, and around 1831 it was dubbed "The Underground Railroad," after the then emerging steam railroads. The system even used terms used in railroading: the homes and businesses where fugitives would rest and eat were called "stations" and "depots" and were run by "stationmasters," those who contributed money or goods were "stockholders," and the "conductor" was responsible for moving fugitives from one station to the next.

For the slave, running away to the North was anything but easy. The first step was to escape from the slaveholder. For many slaves, this meant relying on his or her own resources. Sometimes a "conductor," posing as a slave, would enter a plantation and then guide the runaways northward. The fugitives would move at night. They would generally travel between 10 and 20 miles to the next station, where they would rest and eat, hiding in barns and other out-of-the-way places. While they waited, a message would be sent to the next station to alert its stationmaster.

The fugitives would also travel by train and boat -- conveyances that sometimes had to be paid for. Money was also needed to improve the appearance of the runaways -- a black man, woman, or child in tattered clothes would invariably attract suspicious eyes. This money was donated by individuals and also raised by various groups, including vigilance committees.

Vigilance committees sprang up in the larger towns and cities of the North, most prominently in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. In addition to soliciting money, the organizations provided food, lodging and money, and helped the fugitives settle into a community by helping them find jobs and providing letters of recommendation.

The Underground Railroad had many notable participants, including John Fairfield in Ohio, the son of a slaveholding family, who made many daring rescues, Levi Coffin, a Quaker who assisted more than 3,000 slaves, and Harriet Tubman, who made 19 trips into the South and escorted over 300 slaves to freedom.

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The Underground Railroad, a vast network of people who helped fugitive slaves escape to the North and to Canada, was not run by any single organization or person. Rather, it consisted of many individuals -- many whites but predominently black -- who knew only of the local efforts to aid fugitives and not of the overall operation.

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Abolitionists are the people who wish to abolish slavery. Abolition was a big part of the Civil War.

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Find a summary, definition and facts about the Abolitionist Movement for kids. Harriet Tubman and the Abolitionist Movement for kids. Information about the Abolitionist Movement for kids, children, homework and schools.

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Dred Scott was a slave who sought freedom and lived in a slave free area. The case went to the supreme court.

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What was the Dred Scott decision?

How did the Dred Scott decision contribute to the American Civil War?

How did the Dred Scott decision affect the election of 1860?

How is the Dred Scott decision remembered?

Dred Scott decision, legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court on March 6, 1857, ruled (7-2) that a slave ( Dred Scott) who had resided in a free state and territory (where slavery was prohibited) was not thereby entitled to his freedom; that African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States; and that the Missouri Compromise (1820), which had declared free all territories west of Missouri and north of latitude 36°30′, was unconstitutional. The decision added fuel to the sectional controversy and pushed the country closer to civil war.

Among constitutional scholars, Scott v. Sandford is widely considered the worst decision ever rendered by the Supreme Court. It has been cited in particular as the most egregious example in the court's history of wrongly imposing a judicial solution on a political problem. A later chief justice, Charles Evans Hughes, famously characterized the decision as the court's great "self-inflicted wound."

Background

Dred Scott was a slave who was owned by John Emerson of Missouri. In 1833 Emerson undertook a series of moves as part of his service in the U.S. military. He took Scott from Missouri (a slave state) to Illinois (a free state) and finally into the Wisconsin Territory (a free territory). During this period, Scott met and married Harriet Robinson, who became part of the Emerson household. Emerson married in 1838, and in the early 1840s he and his wife returned with the Scotts to Missouri, where Emerson died in 1843.

Scott reportedly attempted to purchase his freedom from Emerson's widow, who refused the sale. In 1846, with the help of antislavery lawyers, Harriet and Dred Scott filed individual lawsuits for their freedom in Missouri state court in St. Louis on the grounds that their residence in a free state and a free territory had freed them from the bonds of slavery. It was later agreed that only Dred's case would move forward; the decision in that case would apply to Harriet's case as well. Although the case was long thought to have been unusual, historians later demonstrated that several hundred suits for freedom were filed by or on behalf of slaves in the decades before the Civil War.

All-American History Quiz

Scott v. Emerson took years to be resolved. In 1850 the state court declared Scott free, but the verdict was reversed in 1852 by the Missouri Supreme Court (which thereby invalidated Missouri's long-standing doctrine of "once free, always free"). Emerson's widow then left Missouri and gave control of her late husband's estate to her brother, John F.A. Sanford, a resident of New York state (his last name was later incorrectly spelled Sandford on court documents). Because Sanford was not subject to suit in Missouri, Scott's lawyers filed a suit against him in U.S. district (federal) court, which found in Sanford's favour. The case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which announced its decision in March 1857, just two days after the inauguration of Pres. James Buchanan.

The decision

Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney's opinion for the court was arguably the worst he ever wrote. He ignored precedent, distorted history, imposed a rigid rather than a flexible construction on the Constitution, ignored specific grants of power in the Constitution, and tortured meanings out of other, more-obscure clauses. His logic on the citizenship issue was perhaps the most convoluted. He admitted that African Americans could be citizens of a particular state and that they might even be able to vote, as they in fact did in some states. But he argued that state citizenship had nothing to do with national citizenship and that African Americans could not sue in federal court because they could not be citizens of the United States. Scott's suit, therefore, should have been dismissed for lack of jurisdiction by the district court. On this point, however, Taney stood on shaky constitutional ground: if even one state considered an African American a citizen, then the Constitution required that all states, and by inference also the federal government, had to accord that person "all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States" (Article IV, Section 2), which includes the right to sue in federal court. Furthermore, Article III, which establishes the jurisdiction of the federal courts, does not mention national citizenship but rather declares that "the judicial Power" shall extend, among other things, "to Controversies...between Citizens of different States" (the so-called "diversity jurisdiction").

Even with this weak argument, Taney could have been accused of nothing worse than faulty reasoning, if he had stopped there. If Scott was not a U.S. citizen, he could not sue in federal court, and the case would therefore have been improvidently granted. But Taney was determined to impose a judicial solution on the slavery controversy. Although later courts would adopt the policy of deciding constitutional questions on the narrowest possible grounds, the pre-Civil War courts often decided all issues that could support their rulings. Thus Taney continued, holding that Scott had never been free and that Congress had in fact exceeded its authority in the Missouri Compromise because it had no power to forbid or abolish slavery in the territories. The Missouri Compromise, which had served as the accepted constitutional settlement for nearly four decades, thus fell. Even the doctrine of popular sovereignty as articulated in the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854)-whereby the people of each federal territory would have the power to decide whether the territory would enter the Union as a free or a slave state-lacked constitutional legitimacy, according to Taney. He thus voided the principles of free soil (opposition to slavery in the territories and in newly admitted states), territorial sovereignty, and indeed every aspect of antislavery constitutional thought.

Regarding the question of Scott's freedom, Taney held that Scott could not claim to be free on the basis of his residence in Illinois or Wisconsin. Whatever status Scott might have had while in a free state or territory, he argued, once he had returned to Missouri his status depended entirely on local law, notwithstanding the doctrine of once free, always free.

Taney would have been on reasonably strong ground had he limited himself to upholding the district court's decision based on the idea that status was to be determined by the states. Alternatively, he could have held that Scott was not entitled to sue Sanford in federal court on the basis of diversity of jurisdiction, because Missouri did not allow even free African Americans to be citizens. But Taney outraged much of the North by asserting that African Americans could never be citizens of the United States. The framers, in his view, did not regard African Americans as being among the "people" for whose benefit and protection the new government was founded, notwithstanding the perfectly general language of the Declaration of Independence and of the preamble to the Constitution.

Two justices, John McLean of Ohio and Benjamin R. Curtis of Massachusetts, wrote devastating critiques of Taney's opinion. Curtis in particular undercut most of Taney's historical arguments, showing that African Americans had voted in a number of states at the founding. "At the time of the ratification of the Articles of Confederation," he wrote:

All free native-born inhabitants of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina, though descended from African slaves, were not only citizens of those States, but such of them as had the other necessary qualifications possessed the franchise of electors, on equal terms with other citizens.

Thus, Curtis argued, they were members of the nation and could not now be denied the right to claim citizenship.

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Dred Scott decision | Definition, History, Summary, Significance, & Facts

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Dred Scott decision, legal case (1857) in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (7-2) that a slave who had resided in a free state and territory was not thereby entitled to his freedom, that African Americans were not and could never be U.S. citizens, and that the Missouri Compromise (1820) was unconstitutional.

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The Civil War's main cause was over whether or not the states should allow slavery.

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slavery, condition in which one human being was owned by another. A slave was considered by law as property, or chattel, and was deprived of most of the rights ordinarily held by free persons.

There is no consensus on what a slave was or on how the institution of slavery should be defined. Nevertheless, there is general agreement among historians, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, and others who study slavery that most of the following characteristics should be present in order to term a person a slave. The slave was a species of property; thus, he belonged to someone else. In some societies slaves were considered movable property, in others immovable property, like real estate. They were objects of the law, not its subjects. Thus, like an ox or an ax, the slave was not ordinarily held responsible for what he did. He was not personally liable for torts or contracts. The slave usually had few rights and always fewer than his owner, but there were not many societies in which he had absolutely none. As there are limits in most societies on the extent to which animals may be abused, so there were limits in most societies on how much a slave could be abused. The slave was removed from lines of natal descent. Legally, and often socially, he had no kin. No relatives could stand up for his rights or get vengeance for him. As an "outsider," "marginal individual," or "socially dead person" in the society where he was enslaved, his rights to participate in political decision making and other social activities were fewer than those enjoyed by his owner. The product of a slave's labour could be claimed by someone else, who also frequently had the right to control his physical reproduction.

Slavery was a form of dependent labour performed by a nonfamily member. The slave was deprived of personal liberty and the right to move about geographically as he desired. There were likely to be limits on his capacity to make choices with regard to his occupation and sexual partners as well. Slavery was usually, but not always, involuntary. If not all of these characterizations in their most restrictive forms applied to a slave, the slave regime in that place is likely to be characterized as "mild"; if almost all of them did, then it ordinarily would be characterized as "severe."

Slaves were generated in many ways. Probably the most frequent was capture in war, either by design, as a form of incentive to warriors, or as an accidental by-product, as a way of disposing of enemy troops or civilians. Others were kidnapped on slave-raiding or piracy expeditions. Many slaves were the offspring of slaves. Some people were enslaved as a punishment for crime or debt, others were sold into slavery by their parents, other relatives, or even spouses, sometimes to satisfy debts, sometimes to escape starvation. A variant on the selling of children was the exposure, either real or fictitious, of unwanted children, who were then rescued by others and made slaves. Another source of slavery was self-sale, undertaken sometimes to obtain an elite position, sometimes to escape destitution.

Slavery existed in a large number of past societies whose general characteristics are well known. It was rare among primitive peoples, such as the hunter-gatherer societies, because for slavery to flourish, social differentiation or stratification was essential. Also essential was an economic surplus, for slaves were often consumption goods who themselves had to be maintained rather than productive assets who generated income for their owner. Surplus was also essential in slave systems where the owners expected economic gain from slave ownership.

Ordinarily there had to be a perceived labour shortage, for otherwise it is unlikely that most people would bother to acquire or to keep slaves. Free land, and more generally, open resources, were often a prerequisite for slavery; in most cases where there were no open resources, non-slaves could be found who would fulfill the same social functions at lower cost. Last, some centralized governmental institutions willing to enforce slave laws had to exist, or else the property aspects of slavery were likely to be chimerical. Most of these conditions had to be present in order for slavery to exist in a society; if they all were, until the abolition movement of the 19th century swept throughout most of the world, it was almost certain that slavery would be present. Although slavery existed almost everywhere, it seems to have been especially important in the development of two of the world's major civilizations, Western (including ancient Greece and Rome) and Islamic.

There have been two basic types of slavery throughout recorded history. The most common has been what is called household, patriarchal, or domestic slavery. Although domestic slaves occasionally worked outside the household, for example, in haying or harvesting, their primary function was that of menials who served their owners in their homes or wherever else the owners might be, such as in military service. Slaves often were a consumption-oriented status symbol for their owners, who in many societies spent much of their surplus on slaves. Household slaves sometimes merged in varying degrees with the families of their owners, so that boys became adopted sons or women became concubines or wives who gave birth to heirs. Temple slavery, state slavery, and military slavery were relatively rare and distinct from domestic slavery, but in a very broad outline they can be categorized as the household slaves of a temple or the state.

The other major type of slavery was productive slavery. It was relatively infrequent and occurred primarily in Classical Athenian Greece and Rome and in the post-Columbian circum-Caribbean New World. It also was found in 9th-century Iraq, among the Kwakiutl Indians of the American Northwest, and in a few areas of sub-Saharan Africa in the 19th century. Although slaves also were employed in the household, slavery in all of those societies seems to have existed predominantly to produce marketable commodities in mines or on plantations.

A major theoretical issue is the relationship between productive slavery and the status of a society as a slave or a slave-owning society. In a slave society, slaves composed a significant portion (at least 20-30 percent) of the total population, and much of that society's energies were mobilized toward getting and keeping slaves. In addition the institution of slavery had a significant impact on the society's institutions, such as the family, and on its social thought, law, and economy. It seems clear that it was quite possible for a slave society to exist without productive slavery; the known historical examples were concentrated in Africa and Asia. It is also clear that most of the slave societies have been concentrated in Western (including Greece and Rome) and Islamic civilizations. In a slave-owning society, slaves were present but in smaller numbers, and they were much less the focus of the society's energies.

Slavery was a species of dependent labour differentiated from other forms primarily by the fact that in any society it was the most degrading and most severe. Slavery was the prototype of a relationship defined by domination and power. But throughout the centuries man has invented other forms of dependent labour besides slavery, including serfdom, indentured labour, and peonage. The term serfdom is much overused, often where it is not appropriate (always as an appellation of opprobrium). In the past a serf usually was an agriculturalist, whereas, depending upon the society, a slave could be employed in almost any occupation. Canonically, serfdom was the dependent condition of much of the western and central European peasantry from the time of the decline of the Roman Empire until the era of the French Revolution. This included a "second enserfment" that swept over central and some of eastern Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. Russia did not know the "first enserfment"; serfdom began there gradually in the mid-15th century, was completed by 1649, and lasted until 1906. Whether the term serfdom appropriately describes the condition of the peasantry in other contexts is a matter of vigorous contention. Be that as it may, the serf was also distinguished from the slave by the fact that he was usually the subject of the law-i.e., he had some rights, whereas the slave, the object of the law, had significantly fewer rights. The serf, moreover, was usually bound to the land (the most significant exception was the Russian serf between about 1700 and 1861), whereas the slave was always bound to his owner; i.e., he had to live where his owner told him to, and he often could be sold by his owner at any time. The serf usually owned his means of production (grain, livestock, implements) except the land, whereas the slave owned nothing, often not even the clothes on his back. The serf's right to marry off his lord's estate often was restricted, but the master's interference in his reproductive and family life ordinarily was much less than was the case for the slave. Serfs could be called upon by the state to pay taxes, to perform corvée labour on roads, and to serve in the army, but slaves usually were exempt from all of those obligations.

A person became an indentured servant by borrowing money and then voluntarily agreeing to work off the debt during a specified term. In some societies indentured servants probably differed little from debt slaves (i.e., persons who initially were unable to pay off obligations and thus were forced to work them off at an amount per year specified by law). Debt slaves, however, were regarded as criminals (essentially thieves) and thus liable to harsher treatment. Perhaps as many as half of all the white settlers in North America were indentured servants, who agreed to work for someone (the purchaser of the indenture) upon arrival to pay for their passage. Some indentured servants alleged that they were treated worse than slaves; the economic logic of the situation was that slave owners thought of their slaves as a long-term investment whose value would drop if maltreated, whereas the short-term (typically four years) indentured servants could be abused almost to death because their masters had only a brief interest in them. Practices varied, but indenture contracts sometimes specified that the servants were to be set free with a sum of money, sometimes a plot of land, perhaps even a spouse, whereas for manumitted slaves the terms usually depended more on the generosity of the owner.

Peons were either persons forced to work off debts or criminals. Peons, who were the Latin American variant of debt slaves, were forced to work for their creditors to pay off what they owed. They tended to merge with felons because people in both categories were considered criminals, and that was especially true in societies where money fines were the main sanction and form of restitution for crimes. Thus, the felon who could not pay his fine was an insolvent debtor. The debt peon had to work for his creditor, and the labour of the criminal peon was sold by the state to a third party. Peons had even less recourse to the law for bad treatment than did indentured servants, and the terms of manumission for the former typically were less favourable than for the latter.

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Slavery is the condition in which one human being is owned by another. Under slavery, an enslaved person is considered by law as property, or chattel, and is deprived of most of the rights ordinarily held by free persons. Learn more about the history, legality, and sociology of slavery in this article.

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Most of the South wanted to have a secession. Secession was one of the causes of the Civil War

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The Civil War Trust's history article analyzing the reasons for secession as set forth in the Articles of Secession and Declarations of Causes issued by the Southern states.