It must be made clear that the issue of slavery that led to the Civil War was far less a moral issue than a political and economic one. The North became more industrialized. The South remained agricultural, and depended on human labor, not machinery, to create a profitable enterprise. But, slavery preceded even our Constitution and our so-called "Fathers" of our nation recognized the need for slavery and the disparity between white and black. For one thing, even a free black man was considered only three-fifth of an American citizen compared to a white citizen.
What many today also fail to understand is that even in the Bill of Rights white dominance over blacks is recognized as legal: The Tenth Amendment which states that any power not specifically assigned to the federal government is given to the states. This particular Amendment really avoids coming to terms with whether slavery is or should be legal. It allows any and all slaveholders to go into other states where one of their slaves may have fled and that state is duty-bound to return that slave):
"No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due." (U.S. Constitution 1787 Article IV)
Slavery was actually legal until 1808. "When the first census was taken in 1790, there were 757,000 Negroes, nine out of ten of them slaves" (Lerner 1957 16). What is also important to realize is that, once the slave trade was considered illegal and no more slaves could be imported, the slaves "on hand" so to speak, became more valuable as "property."
While the struggles over the moral issue of slavery continued and even caused violence- such as John Brown's Harper Ferry raid to create an anti-Southern insurrection, the reality of...