uite differently. Though their numbers were nearly equal to the white population in the South-in 1860 four million blacks and five and a half million whites populated the eleven states that eventually seceded--their status as human chattel precluded them from exercising any control over their lives or the lives of their families. "A slave entered the world in a one-room dirt-floored shack," wrote Geoffrey C. Ward in The Civil War. "Drafty in winter, reeking in summer, slave cabins bred pneumonia, typhus, cholera, tuberculosis. The child who survived to be sent to the fields at twelve was likely to have rotten teeth, worms, dysentery, malaria. Fewer than four out of one hundred slaves lived to be sixty." Sold on the auction block, forbidden to read or write, subject to the whims of their masters, generations of slaves worked the hot fields of the South as voiceless cogs in the region's agrarian machine. In the Northern states of America, meanwhile, voices calling for abolition of the institution of slavery had grown progressively louder during the first half of the nineteenth century. By the1850s, most citizens were quite familiar with the living conditions in which blacks were forced to live in the South; they had been educated by an avalanche of abolitionist mailing campaigns, door-to-door visits, pamphlets, and meetings, all of which castigated Slave-holding as a shameful and wicked practice. Southerners, though, were defiant. This defiance could be traced in large measure to economic concerns, but Southerners also resented abolitionists' appropriation of the moral high ground in the debate. After the 1831 Nat Turner Rebellion, in which Turner, a black freeman, led a slave revolt in Virginia that resulted in the deaths of fifty-seven whites, apologists for slavery defended the practice with renewed vigor, even going so far as to call it a good and moral institution. The growing tension between North and South was evident in the nation...
