The United States and Their Industries

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1899. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER X. THE CIVIL WAR. Although the history of the United States has been tolerably free from foreign wars, as far as wars go in the building up of a nation (for the wars with England can scarcely be called foreign wars), she has been torn by one great Civil War. The chief cause of the quarrel was slavery, and the States fell into two great divisions, the Northern trying to suppress the institution, and the Southern to uphold it. From very early times slaves had been imported into the United States, as they were into the West Indies and elsewhere. Under the teaching of great philanthropists in England such as Clarkson and Wilberforce, the Slave-trade was abolished, and the era of Slave Emancipation begun, in 1837. The feeling against slavery took longer to come to a head in America, where the Southern industries depended so much upon the help of slaves. But in 1808 the Slave-trade had been forbidden, and in 1822 some philanthropic Americans founded a kind of Free State for slaves in Liberia, on the west coast of Africa, thus restoring the Negro population to its original home. The Northern States were gradually ceasing to use slaves at all, as they were developing skilled industries and manufactures. A kind of commercial rivalry gradually sprang up between North and South, the object of the North being to raise the price of all manufactures that came into America, and so to force the South to buy from them. At the same time there was a good deal of sentiment and feeling about the Slave-trade, which has been expressed by such men as J. G. Whittier, the American poet, who sung thus about the fight between the Northern and Southern States: --THE MORAL WARFARE. When Freedom, on her natal day, Within her war-rocked cradle lay, An iron race around her stood...