CHAPTER 10
THE CIVIL WAR
In this chapter, you will learn about:
Slavery during the 1800s. The Civil War.
Abraham Lincoln.
The end of slavery in the U.S.
During the 1800s, the states in the southern United States began to depend more on growing cotton and other crops for sale to countries in Europe. Landowners depended on enslaved people to do the work.
As the U.S. gained more territory, many people who owned slaves in the South wanted to move to the new states and territories in the West. They wanted to find more land to grow crops like cotton, corn, and tobacco. They also wanted slavery to be legal in the West so they could bring enslaved people to work on the farms and grow crops.
Most northern states passed laws against slavery, and many people in the North did not want slavery to be legal in the West. When people from the North and the South began moving west in the 1800s, there were many conflicts about whether slavery should be legal in the new states and territories. Congress began to pass laws that said where slavery was legal in the West and where it was not.
Picking cotton on a Georgia plantation. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
ONE NATION, ONE PEOPLE: THE USCIS CIVICS TEST TEXTBOOK