Description
Why did it take Americans ninety years after first declaring that all men are born equal to abolish racial slavery? Why did it take a Civil War to answer the fundamental questions about liberty and equality that the Revolution had posed? One obstacle was the fact that the Constitution gave white southerners so much power in national politics that Congress itself never did anything very significant to limit slavery. Only with the changes brought about by the communications revolution in the 1820s and 1830s were antislavery activists able to build any sort of organized national movement and even then they met fierce opposition from southern plantation owners who couldn’t imagine a world without slave labor.
