slave state

The free and slave states as of 1861, with free states in blue and slave states in red.

A slave state was a U.S. state which had legal slavery of African Americans. Slavery was one of the causes of the American Civil War and was abolished by the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution in 1865.

States

The 15 slave states at the time of the Civil War were Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia (including West Virginia). (The District of Columbia also had slavery prior to the Civil War.) The last northern state to abolish slavery was New Jersey in 1804, although the laws of that state retained slaves over a certain age as "apprentices for life" until the 13th Amendment.

All but five of these states seceded in 1860 and 1861 to form the Confederate States of America; Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri did not leave the Union. West Virginia joined the Union as a slave state in 1863 after seceding from Virginia.

Original status

Prior to the American Revolution, all of the British North American colonies had slavery, but the Revolutionary War gave impetus to a general antislavery sentiment. The Northwest Territory, now known as the Midwest, was organized under the Northwest Ordinance with a prohibition on slavery in 1787. Massachusetts accepted that its 1780 Constitution effectively abolished slavery, and several other northern statutes required gradual emancipation.

Northern slave states

Conflict over new territories

During the War of 1812, the British promised emancipation to slaves that would support their side. By the end of the War of 1812, the momentum for antislavery reform, state by state, appeared to run out of steam, with half of the states having already abolished slavery (Northeast), prohibited from the start (Midwest) or committed to eliminating slavery, and half committed to continuing the institution indefinitely (South).

The potential for political conflict over slavery at a federal level led politicians to be concerned about the balance of power in the U.S. Senate, where each State was represented by two Senators. With an equal number of slave states and free states, the United States Senate was equally divided. As the population of the free states began to outstrip the population of the slave states, leading to control of the House of Representatives by free states, the Senate became the preoccupation of slave state politicians interested in maintaining a Congressional veto over federal policy in regard to slavery. As a result of this preoccupation, slave states and free states were often admitted into the Union in pairs to maintain the existing Senate balance between slave and free.

Missouri Compromise

Controversy over whether Missouri should be admitted as a slave State, resulted in the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which specified that Louisiana Purchase territory north of latitude 36° 30', which described Missouri's southern boundary, would be organized as free states and territory south of that line would be reserved for organization as slave states. As part of that compromise, the admission of Maine as a free state was secured to balance Missouri's admission as a slave state.

Status of Texas and the Mexican Cession states

The admission of Texas and the acquisition of vast new western territories after the Mexican-American War further excited controversy. Although the settled portion of Texas was an area rich in cotton plantations and dependent on slavery, the territory acquired in the Mountain West did not seem hospitable to cotton or slavery. In 1850, California was admitted as a free state, without an additional slave state as balance. This would have created a free state majority in the Senate, except that California agreeably sent one pro-slavery and one anti-slavery senator to Washington, D.C. Thus, the admission of California increased the anxiety of pro-slavery politicians but did not change the balance in the senate.

Last battles

The difficulty of identifying any territory which could be organized into additional slave states stalled the process of opening the western territories to settlement, while slave state politicians sought a solution. Efforts were made to acquire Cuba and to annex Nicaragua—both to be slave states. In 1854, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was repealed, and an effort was initiated to organize Kansas as a slave state. Kansas was paired with Minnesota for admission, but the admission of Kansas as a slave state was blocked because of questions over the legitimacy of its slave state constitution. When the admission of Minnesota proceeded unimpeded in 1858, the balance in the Senate was lost; a loss that was compounded by the subsequent admission of Oregon in 1859.

Slave and free state pairs

Before 1812, the concern about balancing slave-states and free states was not profound. This is how the states lined up in 1812:

Following 1812, and until the Civil War, maintaining the balance of free and slave states within the federal legislature was considered of paramount importance if the Union was to be preserved, and were typically admitted in pairs:

End of slave states

Maryland and the pro-Union government of Missouri abolished slavery during the Civil War. The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified December 6, 1865, abolished slavery throughout the United States, ending the distinction. Ratification of the 13th Amendment was a condition of the return of local rule to those states that had seceded.

See also

• Free state
• Border states (Civil War)

References

• Don E. Fehrenbacher and Ward M. Mcafee; The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery (2002)

External links

• Slavery in the North

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