The antebellum reform movement of abolition created conflict between differing sets of ideas and interests in the Northern and Southern regions of the United States. Northern states favored the destruction of slavery, seeing it as a violation of the “principles of justice...and the golden rule espoused by Jesus Christ” (Foner 436), and Southern states favored maintaining/expanding slavery due to the fact that “profits from cotton coursed through the whole...economy” (Alexis) down South. Slavery was what held the South in an agrarian state, while the North industrialized and the divide between the two deepened. Abolitionists fiercely battled Southern planters over the issue of slavery, for how could something so morally wrong be played off as right? The American public sphere purposely kept the discussion of bondage under wraps, but with tensions rising, it became a lot harder to oppress.
Abolitions saw the depletion of slavery as a necessary step in order to secure the future of their nation, for the Declaration of Independence even condemned it (Foner 441). Viewing it as an unparalleled evil, a new wave of reforms in the
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Most of the South’s influence in the world came from its colossal cotton crop, gathered by slave labor, for “cotton...tied the American economy to slavery” (Alexis). Southerner enjoyed the economic benefits of slavery and found those very difficult to just pass up like the abolitionists requested. With such big plantations, planters needed help to run them, but unlike small farmers in the South, they could not create enough children to contribute in running an estate of that size; Southern planters needed slaves to continue to make