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the country. The abolitionist movement increasingly called for a complete end to slavery in all parts of the country, and the nascent Republican Party adopted abolition as a major plank of its political platform. Abraham Lincoln, whose election to the presidency would spark a domino of state secessions in the winter of 1860–61, compared the tenuous situation to a house divided and unable to “endure permanently half slave and half free.” 2

Enslaved Blacks work in the cotton field on a Southern plantation, 1850s. On the eve of the Civil War, nearly 4 million Black Americans were enslaved in the fifteen states where the institution was legal. Their labor fueled the South’s economy, which was based on farming.

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CONTEMPORARY ISSUES: REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY