give all the profit of their labor to the master they belonged to. Cotton and tobacco, the main crops in the southern United States, needed so much labor that white plantation owners would have smaller profits if they hired rather than enslave the need number of workers. When the slave trade began, many people thought this problem was “solved,” but dilemmas later occurred because of difference of opinions about slavery. These slaves were on the table of a hot debate that had been going on since the founding of our free country. The argument was over whether or not the United States should completely abolish slavery. In the ten years before the Civil War, not many white males owned slaves, but almost every rich white Southerner did (25 percent of all white families owned slaves.) The Civil War would not have been fought if Afro-Americans were not enslaved by the arrogant whites who thought they were superior: “All historians are agreed that there would have been no civil war if there had been no American Negro slavery.” This quote means that mostly everyone knowledgeable in history will agree that the Civil War would not have been fought if slavery had been outlawed from the beginning in our country. Most of the arguments that led to a civil war in the United States began with slavery, as this was the spark that started most debatable fires in our country. This agreement is true because slavery was the chief cause of most other problems leading up to the Civil War. Therefore, the slavery dispute carried over to debates about the new territories that the United States had acquired and whether or not they should become slave or free states. In the Union, there were fifteen states that were free, and fifteen states that had slavery. Because of this, every bill that would favor either the abolitionists or the slave owners would not pass. The control of the U.S. Senate rested upon whether the new territo...
