Erin ’s Reviews > Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era > Status Update

In 1856 the first national platform of the Republican party branded polygamy a "barbarism " equal to slavery.

In the first 40 years of the republic immigrants had not come in large numbers. Even in the 1820's arrivals averaged fewer than 13,000 a year.

By 1850 all but a few thousand Native Americans had been pushed west of the Mississippi.

On all but one issue, antebellum southerners stood for state's rights and a weak federal government. The exception was the fugitive slave law of 1850.

Cotton from the American South grown mostly by slave labor furnished three fourths of the world's supply.

According to the 1860 census, the average southern white male was nearly 2x as wealthy as the average northern white male.

While the slave population of the United States doubled by natural reproduction every 26 years, slaves in other new world societies experienced a net decrease.

In the eyes of a growing number of Yankees, slavery degraded labor, inhibited economic development, discouraged education and engendered a domineering master class determined to rule the country in the interest of its backward institutions.

As parents lavished more love on their children, they had fewer of them and devoted more resources to their education by sending them to school in greater numbers for longer periods of time.

The one seventh of the population that was Black also bore much of the burden of progress while reaping few of its benefits.